Product Reviews

Fibrenetix has always focused on fibre channel (FC) disk arrays and its Qubex (web ID: 90506) took the honours last year as one of the first 4Gb/sec products in the Labs - it stayed on the A List for some time. The latest E2 arrays up the ante, as these 3U rack chassis aim to deliver high-performance storage and plenty of it for the price.

The system was supplied with 16 of Hitachi's latest 1TB SATA hard disks, allowing the E2 to deliver a total raw capacity that defies belief. The drives are encased in hot-swap carriers, but build quality is a slight concern: the lever on one carrier wouldn't lock down. You can keep an eye on operations locally, as it comes with a backlit LCD panel with control pad, and the unit can be removed. The chassis uses the same Daytona RAID engine as the Qubex, so you get good fault tolerance, including support for RAID6 dual redundant arrays. There are also two 4Gb/sec FC ports and a pair of hot-swap power supplies.

We found deployment into the Labs' 4Gb/sec FC SAN simple, as the controller can be accessed locally via its CLI and remotely with a web browser. The browser interface isn't particularly pretty,

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but it's easy to use and provides good levels of access to the various features. You can start by creating your own arrays or use the quick-start option, which takes all the drives and does it for you. For manual control, you add selected drives to RAID sets and then create volume sets within these, each with their own array type. You can add hot-spare drives to arrays and also expand them on-the-fly. Access controls extend to assigning volumes to either FC port or both for clustering, and filters can be used to allow or deny access to specific FC hosts. In the event of errors or faults, alerts can be sent using SNMP traps, and the controller can email up to four addresses with information on selected errors or warnings.

To test performance, we used a pair of Supermicro dual 3GHz Xeon 5160 servers running Windows Server 2003 R2 and equipped with 4Gb/sec FC cards from LSI Logic and ATTO Technology. We started by creating an eight-drive RAID0 stripe and assigning it to one FC port. The first server was directly attached to the array and we ran the Iometer utility on the new drive with it configured with four disk workers, 100% 64KB sequential read-transfer requests and ten outstanding I/Os, where it reported a near wire speed of 375MB/sec. We then created another striped array, assigned it to the spare FC port and attached the second server. With Iometer running on both servers, we saw a cumulative throughput of 638MB/sec - nearly 130MB/sec below Fibrenetix's claims, but impressive nonetheless.

Businesses fed up with paying the exorbitant prices many of the larger storage vendors levy for 4Gb/sec FC disk arrays should check out the E2 products from Fibrenetix. The hardware itself does have a few rough edges, but you'll be hard-pushed to find 16TB of RAID-protected raw storage anywhere else for a lower price than this.