Fujitsu Eternus CS800 S3 Entry review

Dave Mitchell Read more June 6, 2012

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£10621

Price when reviewed

Fujitsu moved into the data deduplication space a few years ago, and it now wants to make this hot technology affordable for SMBs. In this review, we test the Eternus CS800 S3 Entry model, which combines big reductions in storage usage with good value and ease of use.

This model shares the same foundation as its CS800 brethren: namely, a top-quality Primergy RX300 S6 2U rack server. It comes equipped with a 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5620, 24GB of DDR3 memory and two 800W hotplug power supplies.

For storage it has a pair of 300GB SAS SFF drives, split into mirrors for the OS and the index database. General backup storage is handled by ten 500GB SATA drives configured in a RAID6 array, and all are looked after by Fujitsu’s SAS 6G RAID card, which has 512MB of battery-protected cache.

You can’t upgrade capacity beyond 4TB and, unlike the larger models, the appliance doesn’t support Fujitsu’s DX80 disk expansion shelves. But the price includes all data compression and deduplication features, plus replication to a remote CS800.

A key feature of the CS800 is how it presents storage as NAS shares, making for easy deployment. Furthermore, as data reduction is carried out at the appliance, it’s transparent to all host systems. It supports any backup software application, and will even deduplicate drag-and-drop copies to a share on the appliance. You also get Symantec’s OpenStorage plugin, which allows the appliance to present itself as storage servers to NetBackup.

We found installation simple, with a wizard guiding us through initial configuration and network port setup. The appliance has six Gigabit ports, five of which can be kept separate or bonded together in load-balanced, redundant teams; the sixth port is retained for service and maintenance functions only.

Next you can get down to creating network shares. Up to 128 CIFS or NFS shares are supported, either public or private, and for user access control you can enable workgroup or AD modes. Deduplication can be enabled on a per-share basis, and once set it can’t be removed. However, you can specify backup windows for a share, during which time deduplication is disabled.

The web interface provides plenty of status information for deduplication, RAID and network activity: you can view the current data reduction ratio, monitor storage, and set up alerts that can be emailed to multiple recipients.

Fujitsu doesn’t publish any hard facts about potential data reduction ratios, so we used the Binary Testing deduplication test suite to ascertain these for file server backup operations. Using a 4GB data set of 1,000 files, the suite allowed us to introduce controlled changes within a desired percentage of the files.

At the host end we loaded CA ARCserve Backup r16 software, and to use the CS800, we just mapped a share and declared it as a disk-based backup device. We used ARCserve to manage a standard backup strategy consisting of daily incrementals and weekly full backups, and after the first full backup had run, 2% of data was modified in 40% of files prior to each subsequent backup. After a four-week simulation period, the appliance delivered a deduplication ratio of more than 10.5:1. During the test, we had thrown over 44GB at the appliance, but only 4.4GB of its capacity had been consumed.

We also tested real-world backup speeds by using ARCserve to secure a 35GB test folder containing almost 17,000 files. Run over Gigabit Ethernet, the job returned an average speed of 45MB/sec.

We’ve heard claims that deduplication can cause performance problems when restoring data from the block store, but we saw no evidence of this. Using ARCserve to restore the entire test folder from the appliance back to the server, we saw average speeds of 38MB/sec.

The Fujitsu Eternus CS800 S3 Entry offers a larger repository than most of the competition for a similar price; with deduplication on the case, this becomes a big factor to consider. It’s easy to deploy and delivered huge savings in our data reduction tests. It’s a fine piece of kit.