Fujitsu Eternus DX80 review

The Equivalent Copy, One Point Copy and QuickOPC features provide volume mirroring and cloning but you’ll need the optional ETERNUS Storage Foundation Advanced Copy Manager software to unleash them and this won’t be available until the beginning of 2010. At present, QuickOPC can only be used with VSS (volume shadow copy service) aware apps and hardware providers.

The Redundant Copy feature aims to pre-empt drive failures and just requires a dedicated or global hot-spare. Array diagnostics watch out for errors and if they see a drive on the edge a copy to the hot spare is initiated and on completion the failing drive is pulled from the array before it goes belly up.

Environmentally aware SMBs will approve of the Eco Mode schedule. Applied to selected non-SDV RAID groups, this will spin down member drives if no host I/O activity has been detected for so many minutes.

To test raw performance we hooked up a Broadberry CyberServe dual Xeon X5560 rack server to the first controller via a Brocade 815 8Gbps HBA and mapped a four-drive stripe to it. Running Iometer configured with 16 workers, a 64KB transfer request size and sixteen outstanding I/Os returned a stonking 692MB/sec raw sequential read throughput.

A second Brocade equipped server was connected to the other controller and given a dedicated quad-drive stripe. With Iometer running on both systems we saw a cumulative raw read throughput of no less than 1380MB/sec showing no contention for resources was occurring.

Clearly, there’s work to be done on the DX80 as a number of key features have yet to be implemented and we found its web interface very frustrating to use.

However, SMBs should keep a close eye on this disk array as and they’ll be hard pushed to acquire 8Gbps FC SAN technology anywhere else at this low price and its raw performance is quite remarkable.