Enterprise Reviews

February 1st, 2018 by Mark Kidd

Dell EMC Networking S4048 S-Series 10GbE Switch Review

Two of the latest additions to the StorageReview Enterprise Test Lab are a matched pair of Dell EMC S4048-ON switches. The S4048-ON is a 1U Open Networking switch that incorporates 48 dual-speed 1/10GbE SFP+ ports alongside 6 QSFP+ uplink ports at 40GbE. The switch also supports breakout cables on each of the QSFP+ ports, increaseing the available 10G connectivity to a total of 72 ports. This review serves as an introduction to Dell EMC's S-Series switches while providing a look at the way the S4048 is being incorporated into our lab.

January 31st, 2018 by Brian Beeler

NetApp AFF A200 VMmark 3 Results Published

At the time of our initial NetApp AFF A200 review publishing, we were in the the process of finalizing our VMmark 3 test process and working through our first submission. We've since streamlined the VMmark 3 submission process and our audited submissions are approved at a regular pace. The recent approvals include the results from the NetApp AFF A200. What makes these results particularly interesting is that we have data with both data reduction services enabled and disabled. For most arrays enabling these services kneecaps performance; not so with the A200.

January 24th, 2018 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Dell EMC Unity 450F All-Flash Storage Review

The Dell EMC Unity family of storage is designed to meet the needs of the midrange customer with a variety of options including hybrid, all-flash and VSA deployment options. Dell EMC Unity storage generally takes over for the previous EMC VNX family. To say it's an evolution of VNX, though, isn't entirely accurate; EMC completely revamped the interface and continued ease-of-use and deployment developments that largely got underway with the VNXe in 2014. The interface is totally new, and the underlying code has been updated as well. The Unity array consists of a 2U chassis with dual-active/active controllers powered by Intel Xeon processors and 25 2.5" drive bays (there is also an option for 12 3.5" bays for the hybrid version). Systems scale up for more capacity and Dell EMC leverages TLC flash in the SSDs to help drive affordability. The systems support block, file, and VMware VVols with concurrent support for native NAS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel protocols. The all-flash systems (or hybrid with an all-flash pool) include data reduction features for further TCO gains. All Dell EMC Unity arrays can tier to the cloud easily and offer cloud-based analytics via CloudIQ with no additional investment.

January 19th, 2018 by Lyle Smith

QNAP TVS-473 NAS Review

Designed for use cases such as virtualization and HD video editing and sharing, the QNAP TVS-473 is the company’s newest high-performance business NAS highlighted by its support for 10GbE connectivity, M.2 expansion slots, and quad-core AMD R-Series APU. This energy-efficient NAS also features AES-NI hardware encryption engine, up to 64GB RAM, USB 3.1 (10Gbps), AMD Radeon R7 Graphics performance and can expand the total raw storage capacity up to 144TB using the UX-800P QNAP expansion enclosure.

December 29th, 2017 by Adam Armstrong

Broadcom LPe32002 32Gb FC HBA Review

The Broadcom LPe32002 32Gb Fibre Channel (FC) Host Bus Adaptor (HBA) is part of Broadcom’s Emulex Gen 6 FC HBAs. The entire Emulex Gen 6 line is designed to deliver maximum performance and low latency to networked storage systems utilizing high performance drives such as flash and NVMe. We will be looking specifically at the LPe32002, which, like the rest of the LPe32000 series, comes in single, dual or quad 32GFC optics.

December 28th, 2017 by Mark Kidd

Premio FlacheSAN1N4C-D4 Flash Array Data Transfer Node in SCinet

In November we attended the 2017 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis -- better known as the 2017 Supercomputing Conference (SC17). Each year at the Supercomputing Conference, researchers and vendors from academia and industry assemble SCinet: a supercomputer and network fabric that serves as testbed and proof-of-concept for new high performance compute, networking, and storage technologies. Premio is one of the vendors who contributed hardware and expertise to the 2017 SCinet in the form of two FlacheSAN1N4C-D4 data node enclosures, with each node benchmarking up to 24GB/s (168Gbps) sustained read throughput and up to 3.6M IOPS. This allowed SCinet to have the capacity to transfer large datasets at a fast cache speed.

December 21st, 2017 by Kevin OBrien

Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd Server Review

In the spring of 2017, Dell EMC launched the much-anticipated refresh of the PowerEdge lineup, upgrading the PowerEdge lineup to Xeon SP from Broadwell. The refresh included the new R740 server family, which encompasses the mainstream R740 as well as the "extreme disk" version dubbed the R740xd, which we will be looking at in this review. This powerhouse server supports a wide range of storage options, stretching up to eighteen 3.5" or thirty-two 2.5" disks for incredible capacity, or up to twenty-four 2.5" NVMe SSDs, if breakneck storage I/O is more of your forte. Compute and DRAM aren't left in the backseat either, with the R740xd supporting up to dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors with 28 cores each and a peak memory footprint of 3TB max. There are few applications this new server wouldn't excel in, which is exactly the direction Dell EMC took when designing this ever-modular platform.

December 20th, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Dell EMC ProSupport Enterprise Suite Review

Dell Services first launched its ProSupport service in 2008, and the response in the marketplace made it an award-winning service with high customer satisfaction. Five years later, Dell released its ProSupport Enterprise Suite to address the growing complexity in the converged IT enterprise environment. As the IT landscape evolves with virtualized systems, Big Data, Cloud, and converged infrastructure, the need for enterprise-class support is heightened. To address these needs, Dell EMC offers 3 tiers of support, as well as support for the Data Center. Enterprise customers may choose from their Basic, ProSupport, or ProSupport Plus plans or select the ProSupport Enterprise Suite for the Data Center, which offers 4 levels of support.

December 4th, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Datrium DVX with Flash End-to-End Review

Datrium delivers "open convergence," which is what they call the next generation of converged infrastructure. There may be as many riffs on convergence as there are vendors in the enterprise IT space, and for their part, Datrium isn't shy about promoting their vision of what infrastructure can look like. Datrium's view sees compute, primary storage, secondary storage and cloud coming together in a highly resilient configuration that is scalable and easy to manage without a silo for each class of storage. Furthermore, because most data calls will hit compute nodes with on-board flash cache, Datrium can deliver tremendous performance without having to go to the data nodes in nearly all cases. This translates to 200GB/s and 16GB/s in peak 32K read and write bandwidth and 18M IOPS 4K random read.

November 22nd, 2017 by Adam Armstrong

HGST Ultrastar SS200 (Mixed Workloads) Review

With high capacity (up to 7.68TB for the read-intensive version) the HGST Ultrastar SS200 SSDs are aimed at the enterprise looking to expand its flash footprint or go all-flash. Not just sporting a high capacity, the drives are also able to hit up to 1.8GB/s in sequential read and up to 250K IOPS in random read. The drive was released in two flavors, though the name is the same SS200, a mixed workload and a read-intensive version.