Enterprise Reviews

September 7th, 2018 by Lyle Smith

Eaton RS Rack Enclosure Review (RSV4261B)

The Eaton RS is the company's newest rack enclosure line that offers organizations a ton of versatility and is well-suited for a range of small to large use cases. The RS Enclosures are highlighted by its customizable and tool-less mounting options for power equipment, high-flow doors to promote effective airflow, and a plethora of different cable management options depending on the specific model.

August 26th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong

VMware vSAN with Intel Optane Review

We’ve talked about it and teased you with it, and now we are finally delivering the VMware vSAN with Intel Optane Review. This will mark the third major review of vSAN starting with a multi-part review of a hybrid vSAN 6.0 followed up by an all-flash review of vSAN 6.2. This go-round, instead of leveraging our Dell PowerEdge R730xd cluster, we are using Supermicro’s 2029U-TN24R4T+ 2U, 24-bay server running vSAN 6.7. For storage we are using an all NVMe configuration with Intel Optane P4800X (375GB) SSDs for the write tier as well as Intel P4500 (2TB) SSDs for capacity tier.

August 17th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong

Samsung 860DCT SSD Review

Samsung’s new data center drive, the 860DCT, is a SATA, 2.5” SSD. The drive is designed for read-intensive, data-streaming data centers. Part of being designed for read-intensive, data-streaming uses is having the drive engineered for the endurance needed. The company states that leveraging its V-NAND technology, reinforced controller and high TBW, make the 860DCT the right drive for the above use cases.

August 14th, 2018 by Brian Beeler

Huawei ES3000 V5 SSD Review

Huawei launched the ES3000 V3 NVMe enterprise SSD in 2016, their first NVMe drive for the enterprise. Overall, the drive was a good first effort as NVMe was just finding its way into the most demanding applications in the data center. This summer, Huawei has built on the foundation of the V3 family with the ES3000 V5 portfolio. The product announcement came at Interop, where Huawei revealed several details of the upcoming drive, which will be generally available in Q4 this year. Compared to the V3, the V5 drives bring increased capacity, performance, and reliability to the table.

August 6th, 2018 by Brian Beeler

Samsung PM1725a SSD Review

The Samsung PM1725a is a relatively minor update to the PM1725 NVMe SSD that was launched in the summer of 2015. Targeted at server and array vendors, the PM1725a slots in as a high-performance option that's also available in relatively high capacities for NVMe SSDs with the range topping out at 6.4TB. The PM1725a features Samsung's 48-layer TLC V-NAND and Samsung's own controller to deliver an endurance rating of 5 drive writes per day over its five-year warrantied life.

August 2nd, 2018 by Brian Beeler

Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Review

Intel's Optane SSD DC P4800X series was launched back in March of 2017 with the promise of bringing a new storage class memory (SCM) media called 3D XPoint (Intel branded as Optane) to market. The P4800X launched as both a traditional 2.5" NVMe drive (U.2) as well as a PCIe add-in card. Initial capacities started out at 375GB with plans to get to 1.5TB by the end of 2017. That capacity goal didn't come to fruition, but Intel did launch 750GB Optane models in November. Regardless of capacity, the P4800X has one job and that is to deliver the highest-speed storage possible to latency-sensitive applications in the data center.

August 1st, 2018 by Brian Beeler

Amazon EC2 i3.metal Review

There's little doubt that Amazon is the leader when it comes to a variety of cloud services offered through their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) web service. With a relatively simple provisioning process and the ability to easily scale instances and storage needs up or down, EC2 aims to deliver all the promise of the cloud at cost-effective price points. For some, though, the cloud isn't just about flexibility and ease of deployment; it's about performance. The business benefits of being able to spin powerful environments up or down for critical applications like analytics can often vastly outweigh the expense of doing so through OPEX instead of the long-term investment of CAPEX. To that end, in May Amazon GA'd the i3 bare metal instance family that provides direct access to CPU and memory resources of the underlying server.

July 26th, 2018 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 Review

The PowerEdge R640 is a scalable 1U rack server designed for computing and storage via a 2-socket platform. Described as a balance between performance, cost and density, the R640 is built to handle workloads from a range of different data center use cases--particularly dense software-defined storage, service providers, application tier, dense private cloud, virtualization and High Performance Computing (HPC). Moreover, Dell has built the PowerEdge R640 as an easily deployable server and that can seamlessly scale from 3 to 1000+ nodes for software-defined storage using Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes.

July 24th, 2018 by Brian Beeler

Dell EMC SCOS 7.3 Firmware Review

Today Dell EMC announced an updated version of SCOS, the operating system used in the SC storage family. SCOS 7.3 is a free update and brings several new features and fixes to the table as any point release would, but in this case there's also a major performance update as well. Due to code optimizations and a move to distributed sparing, Dell EMC has been able to secure boosts across the board. The SC9000 for instance is now capable of 2 million IOPS per array, 20 million IOPS in federated environments. All of the SC systems benefit though, with a 2X increase in all supported systems in 4K 100% read IOPS. Further there's a boost of 50-100K mixed workload IOPS in every system (80/20 4K).

July 12th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7415 Server Review

Earlier this year, Dell EMC released 2 new single-socket PowerEdge servers with AMD EPYC processors - the PowerEdge R6415 and the PowerEdge R7415. The PowerEdge R7415 is a 2U single-socket server with enterprise-class AMD EPYC processors available. Being a single-socket server, users can expect a cost savings in both lower license costs and power costs, resulting in a better TCO. Of course, AMD has also stated that the price of the CPU is lower than the two CPU counterparts, giving the R7415 access to new workloads where conventional dual-socket systems may not be ideal. The R7415 can be loaded with up to 24 NVMe drives that not only can bring a large performance boost but with the ever increasing density of these drives, can potentially offer incredible capacity. This would position the server ideally for use cases such as software deﬁned storage (SDS) or business analytics.