Boston Igloo review: 2U-10T-Stor-10GCX4

Snapshots for virtual disks provide point in time backups and are included as standard. You simply create a daily, weekly or monthly schedule and apply it to all virtual disks or only selected ones. Usefully, you can also mount snapshots as new virtual disks.

WSS2008 also offers iSNS services as standard, whilst the Storage Manager for SANs feature provides enhanced LUN management. The latter requires a hardware provider for Microsoft’s VDS (virtual disk service) which, for the Igloo, we were able to download from the LSI support site.

Along with SIS, you have Microsoft’s DFS (distributed file system) – another feature you won’t find on your average NAS or IP SAN appliance. This enables you to define folders on multiple servers that contain the same files but appear under a single namespace. Clients accessing these shares are unaware they reside on multiple servers so if one goes down they won’t lose access to their data.

Share creation is completely wizard driven and you can now define NFS access permissions on each one.

All participating servers must be either domain controllers or members and once the namespace server has been defined, the data in the specified folder will be replicated at the block level to all other members. This will undoubtedly prove useful for disaster recovery as member servers can be in different geographical locations.

We had expected to see more new features in WSS2008 but the fact that everything now comes as standard makes it much better value. It’s easy to manage and Boston has deployed it on a good hardware platform that delivers in the storage capacity and performance stakes.