Nexsan SASBeast storage review

The appliance can be configured via the CLI which offers smart GUI but we found the web interface much easier to use. It offers a quick start option to set up the appliance, RAID arrays and volumes for you. The drives supplied to us were already configured as a quartet of ten-drive RAID-5 arrays with two drives set aside for global hot-sparing and all arrays were available immediately after power up.

You can choose your own RAID configurations, decide which drives are to be included and split them up into logical volumes. For hot-sparing, drives can be dedicated to a specific array or they can be floating and available to any array. Volume creation comes next and you decide which FC and data ports you want to map them to. We found access controls particularly good as you can limit host access to specific FC and iSCSI data ports and decide on read only or read/write access.

For testing we used Boston Supermicro dual Xeon 5100 and Dell PowerEdge 1950 dual Xeon 5300 servers both running Windows Server 2003 R2. Both had LSI 4Gbps FC HBAs and ran the latest Microsoft iSCSI initiator. Once the hosts were connected over FC their WWPNs were revealed in the SASBeast’s console and we could also see their iSCSI IQNs once they had logged in.

Using the Iometer utility we found FC performance to be on the money with a single host reporting a top raw read speed of 366MB/sec. Running the same test simultaneously on the second server with it accessing a separate volume saw a high cumulative throughput of 730MB/sec.

Initial results from our iSCSI performance tests had us scratching our heads as each server only reported a top read speed of 59MB/sec – well below what we expected. We then recalled our tests on Nexsan’s SASBoy and remembered that these appliances must have Gigabit Jumbo frames enabled.

On our Netgear GSM7328S switch - we configured MTUs of 9216 bytes - activated Jumbo support on the Intel Gigabit adapters in our servers and switched on it for the SASBeast’s data ports. Running the Iometer tests again now saw each host delivering a much improved read throughput of between 95-100MB/sec.

MPIO is supported for fault tolerant IP SAN links and Microsoft’s iSCSI initiator v2 and above has the required DSM (device specific module) as standard. Nexsan’s new MultiSAN IO solution offers more control over MPIO and comprises its own DSM plus link monitoring and management software. It displays all MPIO links and allows you to monitor throughput and apply four different load balancing policies to each one.

There’s little on the market that can touch the SASBeast for sheer storage capacity and it also offers an excellent cost per gigabyte. It’s easy enough to deploy and manage, has full component redundancy and delivers in the performance stakes.