Evesham SilverSTOR NAS 3140

Particularly clever is the ability to dynamically expand each logical unit into any unused space in the pool. Next come portals, which must be created and assigned to specific IP addresses on the appliance. iSCSI initiators then need to be identified and assigned to logical units. For the latter, you must log your initiators on to the appliance, which will identify them and add them to a list ready for selection.

Once the appliance had been set up, we could then add the target portals from our test host systems, log on to the selected iSCSI target and configure the new disk space as though it were a locally attached drive. Performance is very respectable. We tested using a Supermicro dual-Xeon server with Microsoft's iSCSI Initiator software version 1.06 installed. Using the open-source Iometer utility configured for 64KB transfer requests, ten outstanding I/Os and a 100 per cent sequential read operation, we saw an average transfer rate of 84MB/sec over a single Gigabit Ethernet connection.

The FalconStor plug-in currently offers one of the best feature sets for iSCSI support we've seen at this price point. It works well in the SilverSTOR NAS 3140, as there's plenty of storage to go around. Chenbro's build quality is, at best, average, but this is still a good-quality NAS appliance offering a lot of storage capacity and room to grow with the inevitable demand.

Author: Dave Mitchell