The five systems we tested vividly illustrate the NAS platform's variety and flexibility. System design, for example, runs the gamut from Infrant's toaster-sized NAS appliance to HP's midtower standalone Storage Server, with 1U and 4U rackmount models in between. Two systems, Aberdeen's AberNAS 128, and HP's ProLiant ML310 G3 Storage Server, are based on WSS (Windows Storage Server 2003). The other three, PrimeArray's FlexNAS 6800E XT, Adaptec's Snap Server 520 and Infrant's ReadyNAS NV, use an open-source kernel optimized for storage. Prices range from $1,299 to $4,995, and these systems generate a matrix of impressive storage-management features that clearly reflect the NAS platform's growing maturity, even at entry level.
Christmas in January
There's nothing like the smell of new storage in the morning, so we crossed the frozen tundra of Green Bay, Wis., to get to our Real-World Labs® and set up our stack of nifty new NAS devices. We began by building a test network to emulate the workload we would expect from a midsize workgroup: three Dell servers, a Nortel Gigabit Ethernet switch, and a separate workstation for managing the Iometer performance tests. Our test scenario simulated 12 systems hitting the NAS at the same time. That's a heavier load than you'd expect in a typical office, where network data access is much more sporadic, but it was large enough to see some differences in how the systems handled the stress. With systems at this price, we were expecting to see read performances near 100 MBps, or close to the maximum bandwidth of a single Gigabit port, and write performance that would run 25 percent to 30 percent below that.
The process of setting up the file system on each test NAS system varied little, and each system came preconfigured with all four hard drives set up as a parity-protected RAID 5 array. The rest of the process involved logging in to the Web management interface, setting up a static IP address, creating folders on the system's root directory, enabling CIFS and/or NFS protocols and setting up user access permissions. Each system supported domain and user authentication, as well as open shares, and all let an administrator set usage quotas and generate e-mail or SNMP traps to monitor system status. Although the Windows machines from HP and Aberdeen were almost identical for setup, all five test units used surprisingly similar management interfaces--with help screens and setup wizards for inexperienced users.
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