Nexsan ATABeast review

For performance testing the ATABeast was introduced to our resident FC SAN built from a QLogic SAN Connectivity Kit. We created four dual-disk striped arrays with two on each controller and used each to make a single volume. We then direct-attached four Windows Server 2003 systems using QLogic QLA2310 FC HBAs and assigned each to a separate volume. Since FC auto-negotiation is supported, it only took a couple of seconds for the servers to see the volumes as new, local and very fast hard disks, which could be formatted from the Disk Management tool and accessed normally from Windows Explorer. Using the open-source Iometer utility configured with two disk workers, 64KB transfer requests and 100 per cent sequential reads, we saw one server return an impressive 182MB/sec average transfer rate. Adding a second server saw this increase to a cumulative 359MB/sec, while four servers in the mix returned a total of 723MB/sec.

Overall performance is comparatively high when you consider products such as Chaparral's Rio eXp and its collection of FC hard disks was only about 7 per cent faster for raw throughput. Add to this the high storage density, quality management tools plus sheer value, and the ATABeast could be a real animal in the network storage market.

Author: Dave Mitchell