Product Reviews

As storage vendors look for new ways of being more environmentally friendly, they're now turning their attention to the small form factor (SFF) hard disk. We've seen many manufacturers already using them in their latest servers, but Infortrend claims the EonStor B12F-R1430-M5 is the world's first external 4Gbps FC SFF RAID subsystem.

They may not yet be able to match the larger 3.5in. hard disks for maximum capacities, but SFF drives do have a lot more to offer. Reduced power consumption makes them much greener and their lower heat output means more modest cooling requirements, which will have an impact in data centres already maxing out their utility supplies.

Reduced vibration is another benefit claimed by Infortrend, as the smaller drives have a lower transmitted vibration than 3.5in. drives during operation so increasing reliability.

The EonStor certainly looks impressive, as Infortrend has squeezed in 12 hot-swap SFF drive bays in two rows of six across its front panel. The carriers feature a small pop-out grab handle for easy removal. They require less space on one side than standard lever equipped carriers, and the button in the centre can be used to lock the drive in place by turning it with a screwdriver.

The price quoted is for a diskless appliance, but for testing Infortrend provided us with a dozen 36GB Fujitsu 15K SFF SAS hard disks.

The appliance comes with a pair of hot-swappable redundant RAID controllers - hence the "R" in the model name - and these are each equipped with a PowerPC RISC processor, 512MB of cache memory, and battery backup as well. The latter is located in a separate module, which slides into the controller from the rear and can be swapped out separately. Each controller offers a pair of 4Gbps FC ports and a Fast Ethernet port for management access.

There's more, since each controller has a SAS multilane port allowing more arrays to be added to increase storage capacity. Infortrend offers 1U SAS arrays along with 2U and 3U SATA versions, and these can be cabled to both controllers for greater fault tolerance.

The appliance scores in the green stakes, as our in-line power meter showed it pulling a modest 172W in idle, which rose marginally to 177W when under load. We were also very impressed with the remarkably low noise levels, as the EonStor was quieter that many of the pedestal servers in

The operator and display panel to the left of the front panel provides plenty of manual controls plus status information, and can be swung to the side to facilitate access to the two drive bays behind. The backlit LCD panel keeps you posted on the status of the controllers and arrays, and four buttons below provide manual access to the controller's firmware for array configuration.

Plenty of management options are on the table, as you can use a local CLI connection to the controller's serial port or the RAIDwatch web browser interface. We started with RAIDwatch, and on first contact were given the opportunity to quickly create a single RAID6 array with hot-standby, using all drives and mapped to the first available LUN.

Under manual control you start by creating logical drives, where you select physical member drives, choose a RAID array type and pick which slot, or RAID controller, to associate it with. Each logical drive can be split into partitions, and then you create logical volumes for each one. We created two separate six-drive RAID0 striped logical drives, used them to create a single logical volumes, and assigned each one's LUN to a different FC port on the primary controller.

It may be small, but the EonStor is big on performance. For testing, we used a pair of Boston Supermicro dual 3GHz Xeon 5160 servers running Windows Server 2008 and equipped with LSI dual-port 4Gbps FC HBAs. We started with a single, direct attached server and gave it full access to one of the logical volumes.

We configured the Iometer utility with four workers, 64KB transfer requests and 100% read operations, and saw one server report an impressive 377MB/sec average throughput. With the second server connected to the other logical volume Iometer reported an impressive cumulative read throughput of 752MB/sec, showing the appliance was easily capable of handling the extra load.

There's more on the management front, as Infortrend includes its Java-based SANWatch utility. This provides an overview of your entire IP SAN and all available appliances. Selecting one takes you into a very smart management interface, which looks even better than RAIDWatch and offers a lot more features including volume snapshot configuration and mapping. Redundant FC host paths to the appliance are also supported, and Infortrend includes an MPIO DSM.

Infortrend's little SFF disk array sets new standards for IP SAN storage and could well signal a move away from the bulky, noisy and generally environmentally unfriendly boxes we've been used to for far too long. With the price including redundant RAID controllers it represents good value, management facilities go well beyond the call of duty, and its expansion potential will maximise rack cabinet space.