Broadberry CyberStore 316S WSS review

There's more to Broadberry's latest storage server than meets the eye - not only does it deliver huge storage potential, it comes with Microsoft's latest Windows Storage Server 2008.

WSS2008 is only available to Microsoft's certified OEM partners, and they can install it on the hardware platform of their choice. Broadberry seizes the opportunity, packing the review system with 16 1TB Seagate SATA hard disks in hot-swap carriers.

The chassis backplane has integral expanders, so only one port on the LSI RAID card is needed for all 16 bays. This allows one of its external ports to be used to daisy-chain up to five Broadberry DAS arrays. All hot-swap drives are available for general storage duties, as WSS2008 is installed on a pair of mirrored Seagate SFF SATA drives mounted internally.

All WSS2008 functions are now directly accessible from the Server Manager interface, with each one accompanied by wizards. The iSCSI target software is now 64-bit only and has the 2TB LUN support boosted to 16TB. Four SKUs are available, with the WSS2008 Basic 32-bit version missing the iSCSI target and heavily restricted on storage capacity and RAID options.

To create iSCSI targets, choose a volume and provide a name. Make sure your initiators are already logged in, as these need to be assigned to the target. Next, you create virtual disks within the selected target, where you enter size and provide a path name for their VHD file.

To test IP SAN performance, we used a Broadberry CyberServe SR1600 dual Xeon X5560 server running Windows Server 2008. Using Microsoft's initiator 2.08 we saw Iometer report 106MB/sec average raw read throughput over Gigabit, putting it on a par with dedicated IP SAN appliances.

WSS2008 includes virtual disk snapshots, which can be run to daily, weekly or monthly schedules on selected virtual disks or all of them. If a virtual disk fails, you can grab its latest snapshot aand mount it as a new drive.

A provisioning wizard helps create volumes on local storage and - providing you have the appropriate hardware provider for the VDS (virtual disk service) - on external arrays. Shares are easy to create using a wizard and the file-screening, quota and storage report features are now included as standard.