Plasmon Raidtec FS3102 review

Since acquiring Raidtec back in 2004, Plasmon has pushed ahead with its new storage portfolio. This culminated in its Operation RAID strategy at the end of 2005, which offers big discounts to entice resellers to take on its disk subsystems. As we found with the CS3102 array, Plasmon is offering a good combination of capacity and value, making its products a solid choice for low-cost DAS and NAS storage.

Up until now, the only Fibre Channel (FC) product in Plasmon's stable was the FibreArray X3000, but the new FS3102 aims to offer SAN fans a lower cost and a far higher storage capacity. This 2U chassis accepts up to 12 SATA hard disks, and with a full complement of 400GB drives included in the price the review unit delivered an impressive 4.8TB of raw storage. The single controller has been designed and developed by Plasmon and offers support for a good range of RAID arrays, although note that the latest RAID6 and 60 arrays aren't available. Fault tolerance doesn't extend to the controller itself either, as there's no option to add a second redundant adaptor, although the chassis is fitted with a trio of hot-swap cooling fans and a pair of power supplies.

Installation is simply a case of inserting the drives, powering up and connecting the appliance to the SAN. Plasmon thoughtfully includes a couple of 5m fibre-optic cables. The FS3102 can be remotely managed, as the controller card provides a Gigabit Ethernet port, but note that Plasmon has never supported web browser access, so all management access is via the bundled Raidtec Manager utility. The Manager utility automatically searches the network for Plasmon appliances and displays them ready for configuration. We weren't overly impressed with this utility when we reviewed the CS3102, but it's clear Plasmon has done a lot of work here, as the newly designed interface is a lot slicker.

The system is supplied with a default configuration comprising an 11-drive RAID5 array, with the twelfth designated as a hot-standby. If this doesn't suit, you can easily delete it and choose from a range of supported arrays. The Manager utility offers four predefined configurations for file server, CAD workstation, database and media server applications. Choose the most appropriate and select your disks, then the stripe size along with read and write caching options will be automatically set up. Furthermore, the appliance supports multiple array types and you can also dynamically expand arrays and logical drives from the Manager utility.

For testing, we directly attached a pair of dual Xeon Windows Server 2003 systems equipped with QLogic 2Gb/sec FC adaptors. Mapping LUNs to specific FC ports on the appliance is easy enough, as each attached host is displayed, so you can select one and pick a logical volume to be mapped to it. Performance is comparatively good too. With the Iometer utility configured for 64KB sequential read transfer requests and ten outstanding I/Os, we saw one server return a 180MB/sec throughput. Adding the second server saw a cumulative throughput of 361MB/sec - 21MB/sec better than Plasmon's own results.

SATA is now the disk interface of choice for entry-level and mid-range network storage applications, and the FS3102 shows clearly why this is so. At this low price, you can't expect redundant controllers, but this slimline appliance offers a high storage capacity, a greatly improved management interface and very good overall performance.

Author: Dave Mitchell