Product Reviews

Without doubt, iSCSI is a more sensible method of centralising storage on SMB networks than Fibre Channel (FC) SANs. Appliances cost a lot less, don't require expensive FC cabling and are easier to manage. The past few months have seen a plethora of compliant solutions emerging and now Armari enters the fray with its compact DS-104.

Presented as a 1U rack appliance, the DS-104 is a complete Supermicro hardware platform with Wasabi Storage Builder for iSCSI installed. Wasabi is an interesting choice, as this vendor has traditionally had a relatively low profile in the UK. Most Tier 2 vendors over here have preferred to go with Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 with the extra iSCSI support included. However, Wasabi does offer a number of advantages: being Linux-based it's a lot leaner and it comes preinstalled on an IDE flash card that plugs directly into the chosen hardware platform with a minimum of fuss.

The DS-104 provides a solid hardware platform, with a 2.66GHz Celeron D331 in the driving seat teamed up with 1GB of memory. Raw storage is provided by a quartet of 500GB SATA drives, but the embedded Intel controller merely manages the interfaces, as all RAID functions are handled by Wasabi. The appliance does have a couple of Gigabit Ethernet ports, but Wasabi can only use one so Armari places a blanking cover over

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the second port.

All management is via a web browser, and our past encounters with Wasabi reveal its interface has been radically redesigned to make it far more intuitive. Each function is accessed from the side menu and selecting one brings up a smart flow-chart diagram alongside, with hot-links to each phase. For example, selecting the IP SAN option displays a graphic for the network port, iSCSI portal and associated targets (or nodes) and you can move directly to one just by clicking on it. Creating new targets is easy enough, as you choose an IQN, associate it with a portal, decide on a size and implement CHAP authentication if required. Access can be further restricted by associating a range of IP addresses with a virtual volume.

For performance testing over Gigabit Ethernet, we used a Supermicro dual Xeon 5160 server running Windows Server 2003 R2 and with the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator 2.03 installed. We created a single 50GB target on the appliance and had no problems logging the initiator onto it, where it appeared to the server as a new local hard disk. Using the freely downloadable Iometer utility (www.iometer.org) configured with four workers, ten outstanding I/Os and 64KB transfer requests, we saw it report an impressive 88MB/sec for 100% read operations. This did drop significantly for 100% write operations, but a raw throughput of 55MB/sec is nothing to sniff at for a comparatively well-priced appliance. Real-world performance wasn't so hot: copying a 690MB video file to the target returned a 30MB/sec write speed.

Wasabi's software option is a good choice for a simple small business iSCSI solution, especially if you don't want the extra features and overheads of Windows Storage Server 2003 R2. General performance isn't spectacular, but the DS-104 is easy to install and manage, and the price includes a reasonable amount of raw storage.