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With the release by storage OEM Dot Hill Systems in March of its all-new 3000 series AssuredSAN 2U RAID arrays, the company not only doubles its effective Fibre Channel storage bandwidth to 8Gbs, but also provides a new option for migration and disaster recovery with the addition of a 1Gbs iSCSI interface in the same box.
This permits up to four Fibre Channel direct-attached storage connections and another four for Ethernet SAN attachments to local and remote clients and other arrays for snapshots and redundancy.
For testing, Dot Hill sent the CRN Test Center the high-end AssuredSAN 3920R, which includes fully redundant power supplies and controllers, as well as AssuredRemote, Copy and Snap embedded software (note the "R" in the model number).
Each controller is equipped with dual 8Gbs Fibre Channel interfaces and dual 1Gbs iSCSI ports, so with drives configured appropriately, no failure of any single part of the 3920R can cause data to be unavailable. As tested, 2.5-inch 15K SAS drives were maxed out at 24. Model 3930 can handle as many as a dozen 3.5-inch drives. The iSCSI interface can be upgraded to 10Gbs.
After a few setup and configuration glitches, performance of the 3920R was impressive. Testers timed the transfer of a 1.25-GB binary file from the SSD drive of a client machine connected directly to the SAN, which took 10.5 seconds. Performing the same test on a busy switched network added about a minute (1:12). For comparison, copying of the same file from one place on the SSD to another took 11 seconds, and from SSD to internal hard disk required 14 seconds. The Fibre Channel interface was not tested.
Initial setup was fairly routine, with default IP addresses in the out-of-band 10/100 console ports documented in the set up booklet. Pointing a browser there brings up RAIDar, a two-paned GUI interface with tabbed pages with settings and accurate graphical representations of the box front and rear. Without having seen the software before, testers were able to use the provisioning wizard to set up a vdisk, configure a RAID level, and provision drives for it, all in about 10 minutes. Trouble was, the array wasn't visible to the network.
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