Hitachi Data Systems SMS 100

The SMS 100 delivered for speed. For testing, we used a pair of Boston Supermicro dual 3GHz Xeon 5160 servers loaded with Windows Server 2003 R2 and Microsoft's iSCSI initiator. With one server logged into a data port on one controller we saw Iometer return a speedy raw read rate of 110MB/sec. We logged the second server onto a dedicated data port on the other controller and watched Iometer report a cumulative throughput of 218MB/sec for both systems. Single controller appliances won't see such high speeds as logging the servers onto the data ports on one controller saw Iometer return a cumulative 109MB/sec.

The SMS 100 is unique, as it's designed to keep user intervention to an absolute minimum in the event of a hardware failure. Just bear in mind that RAID6 is quite hungry for capacity resources - in a six-drive array you'll lose two for parity operations. Nevertheless, HDS is offering a very competitively priced IP SAN solution that's packed with features and masses of redundancy and has a good turn of speed as well.

Author: Dave Mitchell