Enhance Technology UltraStor RS8 IP-4 review

US storage specialist Enhance Technology is making eyes at the UK and aims to whet our appetite with an IP SAN appliance offering top performance and features at a low price. Its UltraStor RS8 IP-4 is a pure iSCSI appliance supporting eight SAS/SATA hard drives and more RAID array types than you can shake a stick at.

It has four independent iSCSI Gigabit data ports. Plenty of redundancy is on tap, with a pair of 300W power supplies and three hot-plug blower fan modules. The multiple data ports mean you can use Microsoft's MPIO for creating redundant, load-balanced paths to storage volumes.

The controller's SAS port allows up to four extra RS16 JS 16-bay storage units to be daisy-chained from the main unit. Go for the latest 2TB drives and raw capacity can go as high as 144TB.

The appliance has a backlit LCD panel and control pad for basic operations, but we went straight for web management via its dedicated network port. The web interface is easy to use: a quick-start option offers to set up all the drives and will suggest the optimal RAID array.

The appliance was supplied diskless, so we installed three 146GB Fujitsu 15K SAS drives in a RAID5 array. Each array is a volume group (VG), so you can mix different drives and have multiple arrays.

Within these VGs you can create user data volumes (UDVs), which are iSCSI virtual drives. Each VG can contain multiple UDVs of varying capacities. Access controls are good, as each UDV can be assigned to specific iSCSI host initiators, or wildcard entry makes them available to all. CHAP authentication can also be applied on a per UDV basis.

It supports multiple iSCSI nodes that can be assigned to specific LAN ports and associated with selected UDVs. You can decide precisely which LAN ports your iSCSI targets will be presented on and choose the hosts that can see them.

We created four targets and assigned them to dedicated nodes. They were then assigned to their own LAN port. We logged a quartet of servers running Windows Server 2008 and equipped with dual Xeon 5500 or Opteron 2356 processors into individual LAN ports on the appliance to give each one a dedicated Gigabit connection and iSCSI target.

The Iometer utility reported a healthy 110MB/sec throughput for one server, and adding a second saw this jump to 220MB/sec, showing no contention for resources. This continued with the third server, where we saw a cumulative raw read throughout of 325MB/sec. Only adding the fourth server saw the appliance start to wilt, but cumulative read throughput still settled at an impressive 400MB/sec.

The RS8 IP-4 shows clearly that high-performance IP SANs are within SMBs' budgets. Redundancy and target access controls are good, it's easy to configure and it flies in the performance stakes.