Nexsan SATABoy - PC PRO Recommen
Nexsan SATABoy - PC
PRO Recommended

Verdict: Massive
capacity and excellent raw performance make
Nexsan's
SATABoy a top choice for data-hungry
applications where cost is a critical factor
Storage maestro
Nexsan has traditionally targeted
capacity-hungry, budget-conscious businesses. For this reason, it's always
shunned SCSI and Fibre Channel (FC) hard disks in favour of ATA and SATA. And
with good reason too, as the PC Pro Recommended ATABeast, for example, is
capable of delivering a truly monstrous amount of RAID-protected storage and a
raw performance that isn't far short of FC arrays. The PC Pro Recommended
SATABlade also epitomises the prowess of SATA, as it delivers over 3TB of
storage in a slimline 1U chassis.
Nexsan's latest
SATABoy takes SATA to the next level. This 3U
chassis has room for 14 drives, and with the review system kitted out with 500GB
SATA II models it offers a raw capacity of 7TB. This makes the
SATABoy an ideal candidate for applications
requiring high storage capacity, such as disk-to-disk backup and data archiving.
Fault tolerance is a key feature as well, as the system can be configured so
that no component represents a single point of failure. The chassis includes a
pair of hot-swap power supplies, each with their own cooling fans, and the
review specification includes a pair of RAID controllers equipped with 512MB of
battery-backed cache memory. The controllers are mounted in solid steel sleds,
and in a dual-controller configuration disk backplane ownership is split down
the middle. Should one controller fail, the active one will take over and manage
its RAID arrays and FC ports.
Nexsan's NexScan system ensures the
SATABoy can be managed from any PC, as it
offers both CLI and web access. The latter also doesn't rely on any Java
runtimes so can be accessed by most browsers. The CLI interface is particularly
impressive, offering a well-designed GUI rather than a command line. The web
interface also gets our thumbs up, as it's very intuitive and provides easy
access to all functions. A quick-start option gets you off the starting blocks
by automatically configuring one RAID5 array per controller. However, it's easy
enough to select your own RAID configuration and split it up into logical
volumes. Simple volumes aren't supported, but you can choose from a good range
of RAID arrays. The
SATABoy also supports hot-standby drives
dedicated to specific arrays or floating spares, which can be grabbed by any
array with a failed member. Volumes are created next and these can also be
mapped to either or both FC ports
For performance testing, we
introduced the
SATABoy to our resident FC SAN built from a
QLogic SAN Connectivity Kit.
Nexsan claims each controller can deliver
370MB/sec, so to test this we created a single quad-disk RAID0 array and used it
as one large logical volume assigned to one controller. With a direct-attached
Windows Server 2003 system, we saw the open-source Iometer report an average
throughput of 184MB/sec. Connecting a second server to the same controller via
its second FC port saw cumulative throughput rise to 367MB/sec, thus confirming
Nexsan's claims.
If you're driven by
capacity/price ratios, Nexsan's
SATABoy is just what you need. It delivers
excellent storage features plus total fault tolerance, and all at a price FC
disk arrays can't hope to compete with.