Competition in the network storage market is delivering some affordable equipment for SMBs, but Broadberry’s latest CyberStore appliance takes it to the next level. Not only does the 316S DSS-R2 offer a massive 24TB storage capacity for a smidgeon over seven grand, it supports NAS, IP SAN and FC SAN operations out of the box.
The review system came equipped with a dozen 2TB Hitachi SATA hard disks, but with 16 hot-swap drive bays, there’s room for even more. A fully populated appliance can squeeze 32TB into only 3U of rack space, and Broadberry advised that this version costs an affordable £8,165.
The 316S sports a X8DTI-F motherboard equipped with a Xeon E5620 processor and 12GB of DDR3 memory. The drive bays are managed by an LSI SAS 9280-4i4e RAID controller with an SAS SFF8087 internal connector and a SAS SFF8088 external port.
The card’s single internal port can handle all the drive bays, as the backplane has an integral SAS expander. The external port is available for further expansion and supports up to five of Broadberry’s 16-bay DAS arrays, allowing storage to be expanded to 512TB.
As our lab is 10GbE-enabled, Broadberry also dropped in an Intel dual-port card for us to play with. These are optional cards, with the dual-port version costing £875 with a pair of 10GBase-SR SFP modules.
Open-E provides the brains. Its Data Storage Server 6 (DSS) software is preinstalled on an internal USB stick, and licensing is based on the amount of storage to be managed. The price of the review system includes a 24TB licence, but once you reach 48TB, the DSS software becomes unlimited.
This latest version offers a number of new features, including persistent reservation, which enables support for Windows Server 2008 clustering. You have asynchronous volume replication over LAN and WAN connections, while Fibre Channel support includes the latest QLogic 8Gbits/sec Fibre Channel host bus adapters.
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