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Eats shoots and viruses

Posted on 17 Jun 2004 at 11:30

David Moss falls in love with a cute, furry animal, while Jon Honeyball gets his hands on Apple's Xserve RAID

Panda has been doing the business on my own network for about two months now - and as I mentioned, we've been fortunate enough thus far to avoid all problems - so I'm happy enough now to decide that when our present anti-virus contract runs out towards the end of the year, we'll be making the switch to Panda for all the networks. Before then, we should have been able to install the Exchange Server protection module, and almost certainly the ISA Server module as well, so I'll be in a position to report back on how the system shakes down over time and how easy it is to integrate these new modules. If my experience so far is anything to go by, I can see this going quite smoothly.

Nice SAN
Some months ago, I described the range of new NAS (Network-Attached Storage) devices that's emerging, using Microsoft Windows Server as the operating system rather than the embedded Linux, which had been more prevalent up till that time. You may recall that I looked at a storage monster from Evesham, the SilverSTOR NAS3120 box, which came with twelve 250GB Serial ATA hard disks in a large rack-mount enclosure. All in, you got 3TB of disk storage for the princely sum of £4,999 (inc VAT). I was impressed with the speed, the embedded OS capabilities and the value for money: I was less happy with the noise it made, indicative of rather naive fan control, and the somewhat biscuit-tin-like construction of its off-the-shelf casing. However, it was a lot of grunt for the money.

The biggest issue, though, is that NAS devices don't allow you to put active database stores on them - things like Oracle, SQL Server and Exchange Server don't like having their stores moved across the network that way. The solution was either to upgrade both OS and client support so that this NAS device would look like a raw hard disk, or else to adopt some other networking technology that's aimed at such direct-connect topologies. Microsoft has just announced the availability of iSCSI support for the Windows Storage server platform, but this is taking its time to filter down into real products. At the time, I mentioned that SANs (Storage Area Networks) didn't suffer from this limitation, but that the prices of such devices were generally sky-high. I noted also that Apple had just launched the Xserve RAID box (see issue 109, p200), which is a SAN solution, and that its price was low. Getting hold of a review sample from Apple has taken considerable time, but it's now here and running on my network. At present, it's wired up to an Apple Xserve G5 rack-mount server, but don't worry about that for the time being.

The cost of an Xserve RAID is somewhat higher per gigabyte than Evesham's solution: at around £7, 500 (exc VAT) for a fully populated box, it brings fourteen 250GB hard disks to the table, for a total storage space of around 3.5TB. The obvious question is, what do you get for your extra two-and-half large, and is it worth it? Let's answer the latter question first - yes, it may be worth it, but that will be decided directly by your intended use and needs. In other words, you're paying a premium for the Xserve product, but that premium gets you several worthwhile things.

First, the build quality is exquisite. No other word does it justice, and it's on a different planet from the Evesham device. Everything you touch tingles with quality - the engineering of the drive cages, the profusion of temperature probes throughout the box, the cleverness of the fan array control, the doubling-up of everything important. All of these factors are way ahead of anything the Evesham offers. You might think such things are nice to have although not essential, but I'm not so sure - very careful management of fan and disk speeds ensures there are no nasty, case-rattling resonances that would undoubtedly badly affect the lifetime of the disks. The Xserve is almost whisper quiet and this is hugely reassuring compared to the howling rattle of the Evesham box.