Enterprise Reviews

May 29th, 2018 by Tom Fenton

Samsung NX-N2-T Zero Client Review

The Samsung NX-N2-T NX Series Tera2 Zero Client Desktop is a moderately-priced zero client designed to deliver a virtual desktop to an end-user. One of the features that distinguishes the device from many other clients is its built-in support for Teradici’s PCoIP remote display protocol via a Teradici Tera2321 (Tera2) processor. This support allows the device to be used by VMware Horizon View, VMware Horizon DaaS, Amazon WorkSpaces (AWS), Leostream, or any other virtual desktop that supports the PCoIP protocol. Its ultra-small form factor minimizes the space it takes up on a desk, and it can even be mounted on the back of a monitor using a VESA mount. The client supports two monitors and has 6 USB connectors.

May 25th, 2018 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Toshiba KumoScale NVMe-oF (Newisys NSS-1160G-2N) Review

At the Open Compute Project this year, Toshiba announced the release of its new software around NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), KumoScale. KumoScale is designed to maximize the performance benefits of direct-attached NVMe drives over the data center network through disaggregation, abstraction and management integration. The software brings the already high-performing NVMe SSDs by allowing diskless compute nodes (with only a boot drive) to access this flash storage over high-speed fabrics network connectivity. This type of connection will bring the networked storage to near-peak performance.

May 1st, 2018 by Brian Beeler

Dell EMC XtremIO Replication Review

Today Dell EMC has announced the addition of native asynchronous replication in XIOS 6.1 for XtremIO all-flash storage arrays. Until now, replication for XtremIO has been handled by software tools like Dell EMC RecoverPoint for snapshot-based replication or Site Recovery Manager for VMware shops. There're also the options of pairing XtremIO and Dell EMC VPLEX for a variety of replication use cases. While these options solve the problem for many customers, they can also introduce increased complexity and cost, depending on the hardware in the environment. As such, a native metadata-aware replication solution for XtremIO has always been on the radar and is the number one feature XtremIO customers have been asking for.

April 27th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong

Fujitsu Storage ETERNUS AF250 S2 Review

Earlier this year Fujitsu announced updates to its ETERNUS all-flash (AF) line, with the introducing of AF250 S2 And AF650 S2. Having previously looked at the ETERNUS AF250 and found it to be a strong performer (winning our Editor’s Choice award) especially compared to its pricing. Now we are taking a good look at the updated version to see what improvements have been made and how they stack up.

April 6th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong

Intel SSD DC P4510 Review

Introduced earlier this year, the DC P4510 Series is Intel’s new data center NVMe SSD. Designed specifically for the Cloud (with the tagline “Cloud Inspired. Storage Optimized.”), the P4510 is Intel’s first enterprise 64-layer 3D NAND SSD. Leveraging this technology, the company was able to drive the capacity of the drive up to 8TB, all the while being able to fit it in a U.2, 15mm form factor.

April 6th, 2018 by Lyle Smith

Intel SSD DC P4500 Review

The Intel SSD DC P4500 Series is part of the company’s Intel 3D NAND SSD line and is designed to handle software-defined cloud infrastructures across the multi-cloud environment, specifically to reduce server footprint. With its availability in 2.5-inch PCIe, HHHL PCIe, and “ruler” form factors, the P4500 offers a ton of flexibility and will suit the needs of a range of different physical use cases. The Intel drive also features pair-to-CPU core mapping, which supports both high drive count and multiple SSDs scaling on Intel platforms.

April 3rd, 2018 by Adam Armstrong

QSAN XCubeSAN XS5226D Review

Last year we reviewed the QSAN XCubeSAN XS1200 Series that we found to have good performance, good capabilities, and a good price for the SMB and ROBO markets that were its target. For this review, we will be looking at the same appliance with the higher-end XS5226 controller in it. As design and build and management are identical (we are using the same chassis), readers can refer back to the previous review.

March 29th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong

Memblaze PBlaze5 NVMe SSD Review

Memblaze has released another NVMe SSD series with the PBlaze5. This marks the company’s second generation of NVMe SSD products after the PBlaze4. The new drive comes in two form factors, U.2 and HHHL AIC, and in two series, the 700 and 900 series. The 700 series runs up in capacity to 11TB and is aimed for data center usage. The 900 series has higher endurance and is aimed for enterprise applications.

March 23rd, 2018 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Reduxio HX550 Review

The Reduxio HX550 is a dual controller hybrid storage array within a 2U chassis. The system frontends sixteen 7.2k 2TB hard drives with eight 800GB SSDs to create a 38.4TB raw data pool in each system. Stopping there makes the HX550 sound just about like any other midrange hybrid offering that's trying to appeal to the needs of the SMB and enterprise markets. However, Reduxio is much more, in that it offers several unique twists that are uncommon or even entirely novel in this class of storage. Primary amongst these is Reduxio's "raison d'être," which is that data should be protected at all times. Reduxio executes on this mission by offering BackDating, which offers one second RTO and RPO, effectively letting an organization roll back at second granularity at any time. Reduxio customers have found this methodology to be effective at dealing with all sorts of data loss or access issues, especially in the face of the burgeoning issue of ransomware.

March 7th, 2018 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute Bare Metal Instances Review

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure includes a wide variety of service offerings including compute, storage, networking, database, and load balancing--in effect, all the infrastructure necessary to construct a cloud-based data center. In the context of this review, we're interested in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute category, with a very specific focus on their bare metal instances. Like most cloud providers, Oracle offers virtualized compute instances, but unlike most other virtual offerings, Oracle can back these with shapes that contain up to ~25TB of NVMe storage for applications that need low latency. As great as those are, Oracle has further upped the ante for cloud compute performance by offering the industry's first high-performance bare metal instances, ideal for mission-critical applications where latency is paramount. Instances come with up to 52 OCPUs, 768GB RAM, dual 25GbE NICs and up to 51TB of locally attached NVMe storage. For those that desire more, up to 512TB of network-attached NVMe block storage is available as well as GPU options. All the different Oracle compute offerings run on a highly-optimized software-defined network tuned to minimize contention and maximize performance.