StorCase InfoStation

Serial ATA (SATA) is proving to be a big competitor to traditional SCSI. The latest drives offer a huge storage potential at a lower price. Performance is nothing to be sniffed at, either. Although SATA can't come close to Ultra320, the latest 10,000rpm Raptor drives from Western Digital do offer a fair turn of speed. However, SCSI has a greater potential for expansion. The latest InfoStation disk array from specialist StorCase brings together the best of both worlds. Its sturdy 4U rack cabinet offers a SATA backplane with full hot-swap capabilities and conversion to dual Ultra320 SCSI interfaces. StorCase uses proprietary interfaces on the carriers allowing both SATA and IDE drives to be mixed and matched in the chassis. With 400GB disks on the horizon, storage potential can reach an impressive 4.8TB.

A big helping of RAID is on the menu as the chassis houses a StorCase Ultra320 controller on a sled fitted in one of the pair of 5.25in expansion bays. The assembly slots neatly onto an interface on the backplane and the two SCSI interfaces are routed through to the rear where they can be connected to separate host systems. The drives are secured in lockable carriers, each equipped with a display panel showing status, activity and detected faults. A key feature of the InfoStation is its 'Soft-Start' circuitry, which improves drive longevity by preventing any electrical arcing when drives are inserted. It also provides a smooth supply to drives when they spin up.

Initial configuration starts at the local password-protected operator panel, which offers a quick setup option for fast creation of arrays. A serial port at the rear can be used with a terminal emulation session. This offers the same interface, but we found StorCase's Data Master to be the best bet for array management. It still requires a serial port connection but provides a very well-designed menu, with plenty of graphics allowing you to keep a close eye on all components including the fans and power supplies. RAID-array creation is simple enough. You choose the type of array, select available disks and leave the InfoStation to get on with it. A progress bar keeps you updated about the building process.

For testing, we created two, dual-disk RAID-0 striped arrays using Western Digital 10,000rpm Raptor SATA drives and assigned each to the primary and secondary interfaces. We connected a dual Xeon 1.7GHz server to one and a dual Xeon 2.4GHz server to the other, with both using Adaptec Ultra320 controllers and loaded with Windows Server 2003. Running separate instances of Iometer with two disk workers returned read rates of 226MB/sec and 229MB/sec respectively for a highly impressive cumulative total of 455MB/sec. Write speeds were equally impressive, with the servers returning a total of 432MB/sec.

With the chassis costing £2,595, the InfoStation is a low-cost solution for improving local server storage. StorCase can provide the drives if required or you can just buy the carriers, add own your own SATA choices and reuse your legacy IDE drives as well. Management tools are good, although a serial connection is never as reliable as a remote web interface. But overall performance is very fast - our two test hosts returned speeds that were easily on a par with Fibre Channel connections.

Author: Dave Mitchell