Product Reviews

Direct attached storage (DAS) is still the most cost-effective way of improving your server storage outlook. It's simple to install, easy to configure and better value than most NAS solutions. The HyperStar from UK-based United Digital delivers this and more, as it also offers alternative Fibre Channel SAN connectivity.

The 2U chassis is solidly built and comes with 12 hot-swap drive bays plus remote web browser management capabilities. Yet again, we see Serial ATA (SATA) winning out over SCSI, with the HyperStar offering a fine combination of high capacity, good performance and lower costs. The price of the review system includes a dozen 250GB Maxtor SATA/150 drives, allowing it to deliver a healthy 3TB of raw storage. The drive bays are easily accessible from behind the large front panel, which sports a smart touch-sensitive LCD panel for manual configuration.

The brains behind the HyperStar are provided by the internal Accusys ACS-8990 RAID controller, which comes equipped with a meaty Intel 64-bit RISC processor. It's partnered by 256MB of cache memory installed in the single onboard SODIMM socket, and this can be upgraded to a capacious 1GB. Although not supplied for review, United Digital advised us that the HyperStar comes with a battery backup module as standard. A key feature of the Accusys controller is support for

ADVERTISEMENT

two interface cards. The review system came with a dual-channel Ultra320 SCSI card fitted, but you can opt for the dual-port 2Gb/sec Fibre Channel version if you want to integrate the HyperStar into a SAN. Good fault tolerance is also provided, as the appliance has two hot-swap cooling fans and a pair of redundant power supplies.

Installation starts at the LCD touchpad located on the front panel. All access is password protected, you can enter an IP address for the remote management interface and use simple menus to quickly create RAID arrays. The menu system is easy enough to use, but we did find the panel coped better when poked with a solid object such as a pen rather than a finger. RAID creation is simple enough using the tidy browser interface, as you can use a quick-start routine to select the array type and leave the appliance to configure all available drives.

A good range of arrays is supported, including the less popular RAID3, which stripes data across multiple drives but, unlike RAID5, only stores parity data on a single drive. However, it was a real pain to find that any array creation or manipulation results in an automatic restart of the appliance. You can't create multiple arrays simultaneously, either, as all administrative access is blocked whenever an array is rebuilding.

For performance testing, we connected the HyperStar to an Adaptec Ultra320 SCSI controller in a Windows Server 2003 system and created a four-disk RAID0 striped array. As RAID is managed by internal hardware, performance should be good and we saw the open-source Iometer report an impressive 226MB/sec for the HyperStar array.

The HyperStar does have a few rough edges, and if you're prepared to sacrifice remote browser management, the CS3102 from Plasmon Data is worth checking out. Nevertheless, along with a good turn of speed, the HyperStar is one of the more versatile storage appliances at this price point.