Boston iGloo 24-T-StorMagic

To create an iSCSI virtual volume you choose a storage pool, decide on a size for your target and what drive letter it should be assigned. That’s all there is to it as the Disk Manager creates the target, automatically adds the appliance’s portals to the initiator, logs on to the target and assigns the local drive letter to it. You don’t even have to initialise and format the drive as it’s all done for you. Targets can also be created manually from the Disk Manager or the web interface where you log into them from the host initiators manually.

StorMagic’s migration feature lets you move data on selected local drives to much larger virtual volumes and on completion they retain the same drive letter. You don’t lose the original volume as StorMagic keeps it intact and only removes its drive letter. Another useful feature is StorMagic’s automatic disk extension, which can be enabled on selected targets during creation. On each volume you decide when the disk should be extended based on available space and what percentage it should grow by.

To test performance we used a Supermicro dual-core 3GHz Xeon server and a Dell PowerEdge 1950 quad-core 1.86GHz Xeon server with both running Windows Server 2003 R2. We placed each server on a different IP subnet and created and assigned virtual volumes to each one in a matter of minutes from the Disk Manager. With the Iometer utility configured on one host we saw it return a very respectable 112MB/sec raw read rate. With two hosts in the mix and assigned to independent iSCSI targets we watched Iometer returned an equally impressive cumulative read speed of 208MB/sec.

Along with top performance and easy deployment, the iGloo offers many other valuable IP SAN related features. Along with the Disk Manager, the appliance can also be fully managed via a well designed browser interface which also provides access to more features. StorMagic supports persistent connections, iSNS servers, CHAP authentication and ACLs.

MPIO (multi-path I/O) is also on the list and this uses multiple paths from hosts to storage volumes to create redundant links. Setting up MPIO is easy enough as StorMagic provides clear documentation for this process – something a few other vendors should take note of. We configured the two network ports on our Dell server to be on different subnets, logged on to the iSCSI target and from the advanced settings created two sets of source IP and target portal associations. We could now see from the Device manager that we had two new hard disks along with the MPIO driver. Whilst running Iometer on the virtual disk we could pull either network cable out of the server and watch it continue unabated.

The number of IP SAN products coming on to the market is testament to the rapidly increasing popularity of iSCSI amongst SMBs and enterprises alike. The iGloo 24-T-StorMagic doesn’t offer the same level of RAID controller redundancy as found in products such as iQStor’s iQ2850, but this feature does increase costs considerably. What it does deliver is a tremendous amount of RAID protected storage at a very competitive price and teams this up with top performance and extreme ease of use making it an ideal network storage solution for SMBs.