Enterprise Storage Reviews

Enterprise disk, hybrid and all flash array (AFA) reviews that cater to midmarket enterprises and up.

August 25th, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Unified Storage Appliance Powered by Nexenta and Supermicro Review

Nexenta and Supermicro have teamed together to deliver what they're calling the Unified Storage Appliance. The appliance leverages Nexenta's NexentaStor 5.0 software to deliver block-and-file storage and NexentaFusion for storage management and analytics combined with Supermicro's hardware and sales/support infrastructure. The combination brings together a software-defined solution that's already tested and validated on the Supermicro hardware and is orderable from Supermicro as a pre-loaded and pre-configured complete solution. The Unified Storage Appliance comes in five configurations depending on customer need, ranging from a capacity-centric 4U 3.5" hard drive version that can support flash cache, to a 2U 24-bay all-flash configuration that's rated up to 180,000 mixed 8KB IOPS. Each main unit can also support two expansion JBODs for additional capacity. Because Nexenta is the underlying software, the solution is full of enterprise data services like replication, in-line data reduction and space optimized snapshots/clones. Included with the appliance is a next-day 3-year service program (4-hour response optional) and Supermicro offers remote installation service to help customers get off to a good start.

August 17th, 2017 by Lyle Smith

NETGEAR ReadyNAS 4360X Review

The ReadyNAS 4360X is a 10 Gigabit (copper) 60-bay 4U Rackmount NAS designed for SMBs that have massive storage needs and uses cases such as backup, large capacity file servers, collaboration and virtualization environments. Powered by an Intel Xeon E3-1225v5 3.3GHz Quad Core Processor, the 4360X supports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM and comes equipped with two USB3.0 ports, four Gigabit LAN ports and dual internal 700W power supply units.

August 9th, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

NetApp AFF A200 Review

The NetApp AFF A200 is a 2U all-flash storage array that provides an attractive entry point to NetApp's enterprise flash storage portfolio. The AFF A200 features 24 front-mounted 2.5-inch drives managed by dual controllers, and powered by six-core Intel Broadwell-DE processors. The A200 can be accessed with either SAN or NAS workloads (or both). The AFF A200 supports SSDs up to 15TB in capacity, allowing a single array to be outfitted with up to 367TB of raw storage, with additional space available via the DS224C expansion shelf.

July 14th, 2017 by Brian Beeler

Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3 Overview: Flash Native Storage

Huawei launched their OcenStor Dorado V3 last fall during their HUAWEI CONNECT annual event in Shanghai, China. We were on hand for the launch and were able to learn first hand of Huawei’s vision for the next generation of SSD adoption in the enterprise. Huawei describes this as the fourth generation of flash storage, where all flash arrays are not only able to take full advantage of SSD media to deliver excellent latency; they’re also able to leverage data reduction technologies to ensure cost-effective capacity delivery targets are made in a relatively small rack footprint.

March 27th, 2017 by Lyle Smith

Synology RackStation RS3617xs Review

The Synology RackStation RS3617xs is a 12-bay NAS solution built for high-performance for demanding business applications, and helps businesses centralize their storage, simplify data management, and seamlessly deploy virtualization solutions. The RS3617xs comes equipped with four Gigabit ports, dual PCIe 3.0 x8 slots that can host 10GbE NICs, and supports SSD cache for improved throughput.

February 9th, 2017 by Mark Kidd

Backblaze Storage Pod 6.0 Review

The Backblaze Storage Pod 6.0 accommodates 60 hard drives in a 4U rackmount server, with an architecture that puts the emphasis on storage density and price-per-GB. The Storage Pod 6.0 design is the result of an open-source hardware-development process that allows administrators the choice of purchasing a pre-built server or building their own to the same specifications.

January 17th, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Dell EMC SC9000 Review

The Dell EMC SC9000 is Dell’s highest-performing all-flash and hybrid-storage-server solution of the SC Series, built on the legacy of the PowerEdge family and leveraging the latest Storage Center Operating System 7. During the last several months, the StorageReview Enterprise Test Lab has put the SC9000 through our application benchmark protocol to understand how it performs with real-world workloads. Our review also explores the ways that the SC9000 and SCOS 7 fit into Dell EMC’s evolving midrange storage ecosystem, which includes the SC Series and Unity products.

January 12th, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Spectra Verde Review

Spectra Logic’s Verde with Archive SMR drives (formerly Verde DPE and now incorporated into the existing Verde product line) is a secondary file storage platform offering solution capacities ranging from 48TB up to an eye-popping 7.1PB of raw storage. Leveraging the existing Spectra Verde Family hardware combined with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) disks, the Verde offers affordable (as low as $0.075/GB) high-capacity storage for enterprise, bulk storage, archive, unstructured data, large files, random reads, bulk deletes, and files that will need infrequent changes. The Verde head units are available in both 2U or 4U form-factors, with 4U expansion shelves offered to reach the PB+ capacity ranges that few other platforms offer at this price range.

November 17th, 2016 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Dot Hill AssuredSAN 6004 Review

We've long been fans of the Dot Hill arrays, looking at a few over the years including the AssuredSAN 4824 and the AssuredSAN Ultra48 in both HDD and hybrid configurations. In fact, the Ultra48 never made its way home; it's been in our lab serving as a primary capacity array for some time now. Dot Hill was good about continuing to add features to their controllers, making them some of the best in midrange storage. After the Seagate purchase of Dot Hill mid last year (podcast on the topic), the updates have continued flowing; at the end of last year Seagate pushed out a release that dramatically improved the performance of the 6004 series controllers, amongst several other material updates. This got us to thinking about how much more performance could be squeezed out of the Ultra48 with a relatively simple controller swap. Given Seagate's interest in delivering a fully vertically integrated storage array, the timing seemed right to give it a try.

September 27th, 2016 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

SUSE Enterprise Storage Review

SUSE Enterprise Storage is a software-defined storage solution powered by Ceph designed to help enterprises manage the ever-growing data sets. Further, SUSE aims to help by taking advantage of favorable storage economics as hard drives continue to get larger and flash prices continue to fall. While typically configured as a hybrid, Ceph is ultimately as flexible as the customer's demand it to be. While much of the software-defined gusto these days is focused on primary storage and hyperconverged offerings, Ceph is helping to fuel significant hardware development as well. HP, Dell, Supermicro and others have all invested heavily in dense 3.5" chassis with multiple compute nodes in an effort to provide the underlying hardware platforms Ceph requires. In the case of this particular review, we leveraged HPE gear including ProLiant servers and Apollo chassis, but SUSE Enterprise Storage can be deployed on just about anything.