Axstor Ai-Lite Ai-408 review

For performance testing, we used four Supermicro dual-core Xeon servers, all running Windows Server 2003 R2 along with Microsoft's iSCSI initiator 2.03. We configured the appliance with four virtual volumes made up of dual-disk RAID0 stripes and presented them on four subnets, so that each server had its own dedicated SAN storage. With one server logged on to a 50GB iSCSI target, we ran the free Iometer utility configured with four workers, ten outstanding I/Os and 64KB transfer requests. For 100% read operations, it reported 118MB/sec. With two servers logged on to their own iSCSI targets, Iometer reported a cumulative speed of 232MB/sec, and with four servers in the mix this rose to a remarkable 458MB/sec. Write speeds were equally impressive, and we saw 106MB/sec for one server, a cumulative 201MB/sec for two servers and an excellent 402MB/sec with all four test servers in full song.

It may have a basic chassis and rudimentary management interface, but the Ai-408 is without doubt one of the fastest iSCSI appliances we've yet seen. The iStor controller delivers a range of features plus good security, and Axstor complements this with an aggressive pricing structure that offers a low cost per gigabyte.

Author: Dave Mitchell