Evesham SilverSTOR iSAN 1600SA

There's room for a total of 16 hot-swap drives in the chassis and it's worth noting that the Western Digital drives are the latest RE (RAID Edition) models. Whereas the Raptor models focus on performance, these new Caviar drives are aimed specifically at RAID applications where reliability is more important. The drive heads have been improved and the new Betta power controller produces less heat. Hot-plug capabilities have been enhanced with a new internal three-stage mating sequence, and Western Digital's TLER (time limited error recovery) aims to reduce the risk of drive errors causing RAID arrays to become degraded. The only drawback of the Adaptec card is the backplane connectors are individually connected to the controller, resulting in a mess of cables. 3ware's new MultiLane Infiniband-based cards could offer a tidier solution and we plan to look at these next month.

There's no denying the iSAN 1600SA brings together a slick storage solution with huge expansion potential and plenty of fault tolerance. ISCSI performance is comparatively good and we were particularly impressed with the FalconStor software. This mates perfectly with Microsoft's WSS2003 and provides good management facilities, easy configuration and plenty of options that will get the most out of your iSCSI SAN.

Author: Dave Mitchell