Broadberry’s CyberStore 424S storage appliance is prepared for the needs of big business. With Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 (WSS2012) at its core, the 424S promises high performance and expansion potential by pairing one of Seagate’s 4TB Terascale SATA III enterprise hard disks with LSI’s SSD-accelerated RAID controller.
This 4U Supermicro chassis offers 24 hot-swap drive bays, eight of which are occupied by 4TB drives, for a raw capacity of 32TB. Broadberry supplied the appliance preconfigured as a 21TB RAID6 array, with WSS2012 running from a mirrored pair of 120GB Intel SSDs.
The front bays are managed by an LSI Nytro MegaRAID 8100-4i card which has two embedded 50GB SLC SSDs. These are configured from the MegaRAID Storage Manager utility. Mirroring is the safest bet for read and write cache operations, but you can set them up as a striped array if you wish. The Nytro card supports up to 128 drives.
The appliance is powered by a six-core 2.1GHz Intel Xeon E5-2620 v2 CPU. The system’s motherboard has dual CPU sockets, and the price includes 32GB of 1,600MHz RDIMM memory, which is expandable up to 512GB.
The Nytro card has a huge impact on performance. With the cache disabled on the RAID6 volume, we saw Iometer report 2,700 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and 360 IOPS for 4K random read and write operations respectively, with 32 outstanding I/Os. With the cache enabled and brimming with hot data, read and write rates leapt to around 75,000 IOPS and 25,000 IOPS.
We also used a database load with a mix of 66% read and 34% write random operations for a 16KB block size. Performance jumped from 1,100 to 30,800 IOPS with the cache enabled.
The CyberStore was no slouch in our real-world tests, either. Copies of a 2.52GB video clip over Gigabit returned fast read and write speeds of 109MB/sec, and backup operations were just as speedy: our 22.4GB mix of 10,500 small files copied to the appliance at an average of 94MB/sec – a new record for this test.
Warranty | |
|---|---|
| Warranty | 3yr on-site |
Ratings | |
Physical | |
| Server format | Rack |
| Server configuration | 4U |
Processor | |
| CPU family | Intel Xeon |
| CPU nominal frequency | 2.10GHz |
Memory | |
| RAM capacity | 512GB |
| Memory type | DDR3 |
Storage | |
| RAID module | LSI MegaRAID |
| RAID levels supported | 0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60 |
Networking | |
| Gigabit LAN ports | 4 |
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