Enterprise Reviews
- Hyper-Converged
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- In the Lab
October 23rd, 2019 by Juan Mulford
Lenovo XClarity Controller (XCC) Review
The Lenovo XClarity Controller (XCC) is part of the System Management tools of Lenovo. The company refers to this family of software tools as “foundation software for data centers who put a premium on it efficiency and precision execution.” These software tools and applications aim to help systems administrators standardize, simplify, and automate foundation infrastructure processes. Among this family of software, the XClarity Controller is a powerful management tool for deploying agile IT methodologies and speed up infrastructure delivery.
October 22nd, 2019 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab
HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Server Review
The HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 one-socket 1U rack profile server is highlighted by its 2nd-gen AMD EPYC 7000 Series processor, which significantly increases performance compared to the previous generation AMD EYPC CPU. It has been a while since we reviewed a server from the ProLiant line (the last being the DL360), so we were eager to get our hands on this thing and see what it can do. As such, HPE has put a huge focus on intelligent automation, security and optimization for its newest iteration of the power-driven server line, adding more cores and faster memory bandwidth. The DL325 also server offers up to 8 SFF, 10 SFF, and 4 LFF drive configurations and 3 PCIe 3.0 slots for further expansion.
October 18th, 2019 by Juan Mulford
HPE iLO 5 Review
Managing servers in the data center and anywhere in the world can be a complicated mission if you don’t have the proper tools and solutions. Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) is one of the out-of-band (OOB) methods for managing servers and networking equipment. iLO is an embedded technology that ships in HPE ProLiant servers and provides multiple ways to configure, monitor, and update HPE servers from a remote location.
October 11th, 2019 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Review
StarWind offers a line of Microsoft Windows based HyperConverged Appliances (HCA) designed to meet the needs of SMBs and other use cases that are generally budget constrained. Their portfolio includes 20 unique solutions which fall into three broad model lines the HCA All-Flash, HCA Hybrid, and HCA Disk. The All-Flash is designed for small and mid-size SMB virtualized environments and this configuration provides the best performance. The Hybrid models are built to deliver high storage capacity and great performance without having to go all-flash. Additionally, the Hybrid models utilize automated storage tiering to handle performance-intensive workloads in a cost-efficient manner. This platform offers a balance between performance and cost. The Disk models are built to provide high storage capacity and moderate compute power for capacity-hungry applications. This is a high capacity option with the best cost per GB value.
October 8th, 2019 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab
NetApp AFA EF600 Review
Last month NetApp announced its latest midrange all-flash array with the EF600. While the EF600 is aimed at the same market as the EF570, it is not a replacement. While the EF570 does support NVMe, the EF600 is end-to-end NVMe, which brings new levels of flexibility and performance not previously seen in the midrange. Aside from the performance and price to performance ratio, the EF600 offers a level of future proofing that will be able to hit the demands of tomorrow without the need for forklift upgrades.
October 8th, 2019 by Tom Fenton
ClearCube C3Pi+ VDI Client Review
The ClearCube C3Pi+ is a low-cost, and very small form-factor, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) client based on the Raspberry Pi B+ platform. ClearCube is positioning this product for use by state and local governments, medical organizations, kiosks, and other environments where a low-cost, single monitor VDI client is desirable.
September 17th, 2019 by Adam Armstrong
AMD EPYC Rome VMware Review (7702P, 7402P, and 7302P)
Last month AMD launched its second generation of its EPYC Processors, AMD EPYC 7002, also known as EPYC Rome. The new CPUs are being heavily embraced by the industry as they bring the promise of much more performance compared to Intel, even single socket Rome versus dual socket Intel. We did a review for release day that proved out the claimed performance form AMD. Now we will be taking the same GIGABYTE platform to test various AMD EPYC 7002 CPUs (7702P, 7402P, and 7302P) to better help users understand which one they need for their workload.
September 13th, 2019 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab
Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN630 VMware vSAN Review
Western Digital launched the Ultrastar DC SN630 in February of this year, as part of a refresh and rebranding of their Ultrastar line (formerly HGST) of data center drives. Within this portfolio Western Digital has several enterprise NVMe SSD offerings with the SN200 taking the throne as the performance leader and the new SN630 replaces the SN620 in the mainstream single port NVMe space, which is an increasingly popular alternative to SATA and SAS SSDs. The SN630, which is Western Digital's workhorse NVMe SSD comes tuned either for read-centric workloads or high-endurance mixed-use workloads. The drive construction in either case is the same, the functional difference in the level of overprovisioning that goes into the drive, which in turn produces the desired endurance rating.
September 11th, 2019 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab
Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Review (DataON HCI-224 with Intel Optane NVMe)
So far we’ve dived deep into the Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, the on-premise implementation of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Azure Stack HCI can be seen as a best-of-both-worlds type of platform. It has all the management tools from Azure like Azure Monitor, Azure Security Center, Azure Update Management, Azure Network Adapter, and Azure Site Recovery, while housing the data on-prem and meeting certain regulations. Azure Stack HCI is broken down into three parts: software defined architecture, Azure services, and hardware.
August 12th, 2019 by Lyle Smith
Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB NAS HDD Review
The IronWolf Pro is an NAS family of HDDs designed for 24×7 performance in a multi-drive environment. For this review, we will be looking at the new 16TB model, which expands on the 14GB Pro from earlier this year. This makes for a whopping 384TB inside an 24-bay NAS, allowing users to store a huge amount of data without having to add any expansion units. This is certainly great for creative professionals, SOHO users and all types of growing businesses that work with large datasets, as it offers them a more cost-effective way to scale as data requirements grow. The Seagate IronWolf line features the usual 6Gb/s SATA interface, 7200rpm spindle speed and 1.2 million hours MTBF.