Boston Igloo 2U-10T Stor-10GCX4 reviewed by PC Pro Magazine
Boston's Igloo gives performance a high priority, offers good fault tolerance, and has WSS2008 at its foundation
04 January 2010 Source: www.pcpro.co.uk
The editors at PC Pro Magazine have recently reviewed the Boston Igloo 2U-10T Stor-10GCX4 and were impressed to find that this 2U SAS-based storage appliance gives performance a high priority, offers good fault tolerance, and amalgamates Windows Storage Server 2008 with a hardware platform built for speed.
This all-Supermicro package offers good storage capacity for the price, with all 12 hot-swap bays populated. For the OS, Boston has a pair of high-performance Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 SAS drives configured as a mirror, while for general storage ten 1TB Barracuda 7.2K SAS drives sit in a RAID6 array...
...The Igloo comes with WSS2008 Standard, which has all features switched on and effectively has the same support for memory, RAID and storage capacity as Server 2008 Standard...
...Remote management is via RDP, and storage functions are all accessible from the Server Manager interface. Setting up shares is a cinch, as a wizard takes you through the entire process...
...A valuable feature of WSS2008 is its Single Instance Storage (SIS), which delivers data deduplication...
...after less than an hour the amount of used storage on the volume had dropped from 8GB to only 3.5GB, showing that there was also file duplication within our test sample...
...A wizard helps with iSCSI target creation: you select a volume, provide a meaningful target name and assign logged-in initiators to it...
...To test IP SAN performance we used a Boston dual Xeon 5160 server running Windows Server 2003 R2 and logged on to the Igloo using Microsoft's iSCSI initiator 2.08. The Iometer utility showed a 106MB/sec raw read speed, which isn't far from the limit of a Gigabit connection...
...WSS2008 also offers iSNS services as standard, while the Storage Manager for SANs feature provides enhanced LUN management...
...This will prove useful for disaster recovery as member servers can be in different locations...
...If the performance of SAS appeals more you won't go wrong with the Igloo.