Dell PowerVault NX300 review

Dell's new PowerVault NX300 offers small businesses a simple NAS appliance that's easy to deploy and use. For a four-bay 4TB device, it seems comparatively expensive but it does have a few tricks up its sleeve that vendors such as Netgear, Qnap and Thecus will be hard pushed to match.

For starters, it comes with Windows Storage Server 2008 preinstalled. The review system had the Standard version loaded, which can handle unlimited users and has Microsoft's single instance storage (SIS) built in. You can save £210 by opting for the Workgroup version, which supports up to 50 users plus two network ports and doesn't have SIS as an option. Neither version can run the Microsoft iSCSI target service.

Top hardware redundancy is another key feature, as the quartet of 1TB SATA drives are managed by a Dell PERC 6/i RAID controller equipped with 256MB of cache memory and a battery backup pack. The NX300 on review also had both 500W hot-plug power supplies.

The appliance can be managed locally by attaching a monitor, keyboard and mouse, or remotely over RDP. Either way, you use the Windows Server Manager for storage configuration, which provides a provisioning wizard to help create network shares, assign NTFS permissions, share over SMB and NFS and define access restrictions.

The Windows file screening, quota and storage report features also come as standard. With these you can choose what files can be stored on the appliance, limit the amount of space users can consume, and run detailed reports on storage usage.

Note that SIS only offers file level deduplication. It's enabled on selected volumes and uses a Groveler service to search for duplicate files, move them to a hidden Common File Store and replace them with links. WSS2008 supports up to 20 SIS volumes per server.

For SIS testing, we created two shared folders on one volume and copied the same 10GB data sample to each one. We activated and monitored SIS activity from the command line and in less than two hours the total amount of used storage had dropped from 20.9GB to only 10.4GB.

Performance is good for general NAS operations. Copying a 2.52GB video clip to and from a Broadberry dual 2.8GHz X5560 Xeon Windows Server 2008 system returned average read and write speeds of 86MB/sec. Use the appliance as an FTP server and you won't be disappointed either. FileZilla reported fast average upload and download speeds of around 90MB/sec.

The hardware comes courtesy of a PowerEdge R410 rack server, which exhibits good build but is very noisy.

With Windows Storage Server 2008 at its foundation, the NX300 offers a good range of storage management features along with easy configuration and a fine performance. It scores highly for the levels of hardware redundancy but this all comes at a comparatively high price.

Author: Dave Mitchell