Fujitsu Siemens FibreCAT SX80 iSCSI review

SMBs looking for an affordable IP SAN solution now have another name to add to their shopping list, as Fujitsu Siemens makes a belated entry into this hotly contested market. The FibreCAT SX80 iSCSI represents its first venture into IP SANs, and it aims to offer SMBs an easily deployed and more cost-effective alternative to FC SANs.

The SX80 iSCSI uses the same 2U chassis as the PC Pro Recommended FibreCAT SX88, so you can mix and match up to 12 SAS and SATA hard disks, upgrade to dual RAID controllers, and use their external SAS ports to add up to four 12-bay disk shelves.

The controllers also offer two unique features designed to improve performance and reliability. FibreCAP replaces battery backup packs with a capacitor and CompactFlash card, and in the event of a power failure the cache contents are written to the card. When power is restored, the capacitor takes less time to recharge than a battery pack and can provide quicker protection.

FibreCache provides a direct, high-speed link between two controllers. Data written to one controller is mirrored to the other, improving performance by reducing internal system traffic.

For installation, you can use a serial port connection to the CLI, but it's easy to point a web browser at the unit's IP address where we found a well-designed management interface. You start off by creating virtual disks, or vdisks, where you select the member drives, decide upon a RAID array and assign hot-spares.

The controller supports all key array types, which includes the latest dual-drive redundant RAID6. If you have both controllers installed, you can also assign a preferred controller to a vdisk. Note that you can't change the RAID array type later on, but you can add more drives and expand an array. During manual vdisk creation, you can decide on the number of volumes it should have and leave the controller to create equal-sized volumes.

Access controls are good - you select a volume, pick your logged-in hosts from a dropdown list, and decide whether they should have read-only or read/write access. These privileges can be applied to specific data ports and you can assign LUN numbers as well. CHAP authentication is on the list, where you can enforce this globally or activate it for selected hosts only.

For testing, we started with a Boston Supermicro dual 3GHz Xeon 5160 server running Windows Server 2003 R2 and the latest Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator. Our initial speed test involved creating a quad-drive RAID0 striped vdisk with four volumes. Using the Iometer utility configured with four disk workers, 64KB request sizes, 100% sequential reads and 100 outstanding I/Os, we saw a raw throughput of 108MB/sec.

We then added a quad-core Xeon Dell PowerEdge 1950 server to the mix and logged its iSCSI initiator on to the second data port with a dedicated volume assigned to it. On our initial Iometer test run, we saw a good average raw read throughput of 109MB/sec. With Iometer running on both servers simultaneously we saw a cumulative raw throughput of around 120MB/sec, showing clearly that there was contention for resources on the single RAID controller.

MPIO is supported and configuration is covered in the documentation. We mapped one volume to both data ports and then logged in from the Dell server initiator using both IP addresses as targets. During a copy of a large video clip to the iSCSI target, we disconnected one network cable from the server and watched the transfer continue happily.