Broadberry CyberStore AT5-DSS review

We were sufficiently impressed by Broadberry's CyberStore 316S WSS storage server to put it on the PC Pro A List. The AT5-DSS offers similar features but in a compact desktop chassis priced to suit smaller businesses.

It uses the same USB DOM as its bigger brother, but is preloaded with the Lite version of the Open-E Data Storage a (DSS) software. Features missing are support for WORM volumes, replication, NIS, backup agents, NDMP and user quotas, but for an additional £499 you can upgrade.

The AT5-DSS delivers both NAS and IP SAN storage services. Its spec is interesting; along with an Atom processor, there's a quartet of Gigabit ports supporting load-balanced and fault-tolerant teaming, plus a pair of USB 2 and eSATA ports for external storage. The Marvell controller handles only the physical disk interfaces, as RAID arrays are software managed.

The web interface is easy to navigate. We started by configuring four 1TB Seagate Barracuda SATA drives as a single RAID5 array. Next, you can create volume groups using available arrays or drives. Within these are logical volumes that present either NAS shares or iSCSI targets to the network. For NAS shares you select a volume, choose a name, and decide upon access controls that extend from local users and groups to NT domain or AD authentication.

You can control FTP and HTTP access on a per-share basis, while the ClamAV antivirus engine can be set to scan selected shares, quarantine infected files and regularly download updates. Along with snapshots, backup and restore functions are provided for securing data on selected volumes to a locally attached tape drive or a dedicated network share.

For iSCSI, you create targets and assign existing volumes to them. Targets can be read-only, use CHAP authentication and have lists of blocked and allowed IP addresses applied. Multiple iSCSI portals are supported, so you can use MPIO for fault-tolerant links to hosts.

The Atom processor isn't built for speed, and the appliance posted merely average results in our tests. Copying a 2.52GB video clip between the appliance and a Broadberry dual 2.8GHz Xeon X5560 server gave read and write speeds of 58MB/sec and 50MB/sec. FTP speeds were slower, with the same test file returning read and write speeds of 53MB/sec and 44MB/sec. iSCSI operations are harder on processors, which was evident with Iometer reporting raw read and write speeds of only 65MB/sec and 60MB/sec, while our file copies dropped to 58MB/sec for both tests.

Compared with desktop appliances such as the A-Listed Netgear ReadyNAS Pro Business, the AT5-DSS is a more focused storage solution that doesn't waste time with extraneous multimedia baggage.

Author: Dave Mitchell