SCSI-Based SAN Made Easy: Enhance Technology Ultrastor RS8 IP

As the storage market grows, system builders have plenty of opportunities for building SCSI-based SAN appliances. Reselling well-tested SAN appliances is even more profitable. However, many units today sold in small data centers are made cheaply and only come with limited RAID features.

The Ingredients: • Product: UltraStor RS8 IP • Price: $3,095 • Warranty/Support: 3 years • Primary Distributors: Bell Microproducts, CDW, Ingram Micro, PC Mall • Company: Enhance Technology Inc. Santa Fe Springs, Calif. (562) 777-3488 www.enhance-tech.com

Enhance Technology Inc.'s UltraStor RS8 IP is an exception. The RS8 IP case is well-designed and it's made out of metal. At the front of the box, blue and green LEDs provide a view of active drives, including power access. The appliance also comes with a text-based LCD that can help network administrators change network settings without having to connect to its interface. The LCD provides a quick install process. However, when Test Center reviewers tried, we could not get the appliance to take the new settings.

RS8 IP is highly optimized and can run the most demanding applications without skipping a beat. The appliance comes with a 64-bit RAID controller and supports up to eight SATA drives. To examine its interface, reviewers connected through its Web interface. The SAN appliance also comes with a serial port for console I/O.

RS8 IP comes with two Gigabit LAN ports to pass data. The ports support multihomed settings, so each port can operate on a different network. In addition, the LAN configuration supports challenge handshake authorization protocol (CHAP) and link aggregation control protocol (LACP), including the Internet storage name service (iSNS). The appliance also supports SNMP.

As far as storage configuration, RS8 IP comes with RAID 0 through 6, RAID 10, 30, 50 and 60, including JBOD. All the features have a simple drop-down view on the left side of the Web interface.