Broadberry CyberStore 316S DSS review

For NAS shares you select a volume, choose a name and decide on access controls, which extend from local users and groups to NT domain or AD authentication. FTP and HTTP access can be allowed or denied on a per share basis and for the former you can globally limit the number of connections and insist on encrypted transfers.

More options are available from the Maintenance tab with backup and restore functions provided for securing data on selected volumes to a locally attached tape drive or to a dedicated network share. Embedded agents are provided for integration with EMC Retrospect, Symantec Backup Exec and CA ARCserve backup products. Anti-virus scanning is also available using the open source ClamAV. You can set this to scan all NAS shares, quarantine infected files if required and regularly download signature updates.

We had no problems with iSCSI configuration as you simply create a target and assign an existing volume to it. The target name is used to set the IQN automatically, it can be designated as read only and you can enable CHAP authentication. Lists of blocked and allowed IP addresses can also be used to restrict access even further.

To test the 316S we used a Supermicro rack server equipped with dual 2.5GHz L5420 Xeons plus 8GB of memory and running Windows Server 2003 R2 x64. We found that the CyberStore 316S DSS delivered in the performance stakes. IP SAN speeds were impressive with Iometer reporting a raw read rate of 110MB/sec for a single target.

We then added a second dual Xeon Supermicro server and connected it to the same volume but using the appliance’s second Gigabit port on a separate subnet. With both systems running Iometer we saw a high cumulative raw read rate of 213MB/sec showing no contention for resources.

Real world IP SAN speeds were also good as copying a 2.52GB video clip returned read and write rates of around 72MB/sec. NAS performance is nothing to sniff at either with the same copy over CIFS returning average speeds of 66MB/sec.

For 10GbE testing we called up an Intel rack server equipped with dual X5560 ‘Nehalem’ Xeons plus 12GB of DDR3 memory and sporting an Intel dual-port 10GBaseSX adapter. We popped another Intel 10GbE card in the appliance and it was accepted without any problems. With the systems linked together via a Netgear GSM7328S switch we saw Iometer return a whopping 315MB/sec raw read rate.

RAID write caching had a positive effect on speeds with Iometer reporting an even higher 361MB/sec for write performance. Real world performance saw a big boost as copying the test file to the server returned 151MB/sec over iSCSI. NAS also saw significant benefits as copying the same file over 10GbE returned top read speeds of 117MB/sec.

The CyberStore 316S DSS is a clear winner for cost-effective network storage and it offers an incredible expansion potential. It provides a unified solution as standard NAS and IP SAN support can be augmented with FC SANs and performance across Gigabit and 10-Gigabit is extremely good.