Fujitsu Eternus CS800 S3 Entry review

Fujitsu's Eternus CS800 S3 Entry appliance aims to open up the world of de-duplication to cash strapped SMBs.

The Entry model has the same solid foundation as Fujitsu's higher-end CS800 products so you get features such as a Primergy RX300 S6 2U rack server included. This comes equipped with a 2.4GHz E5620 Xeon, 24GB of DDR3 memory and two 800W hot-plug power supplies.

For storage you have a pair of meaty 300GB SAS SFF drives split up into mirrors for the OS and the index database. General backup storage is handled by ten 500GB SATA drives configured in a RAID-6 array and all are looked after by Fujitsu's SAS 5/6 RAID card which has 512MB of battery protected cache.

You can't upgrade capacity beyond 4TB as the appliance doesn't support Fujitsu's DX80 disk expansion shelves, unlike larger models. However, there are no hidden extras as the price includes all data compression and deduplication features plus replication to any remote CS800.

Appliance-side deduplication

The CS800 presents its storage as NAS shares making deployment quick. As data reduction is carried out at the appliance, it's completely transparent to all host systems.

Another advantage is that it supports pretty much any software application that can handle network shares as a backup destination. Shares can also be mapped to local drive letters for general use and the appliance will happily deduplicate drag and drop copies.

Symantec's OpenStorage (OST) plug-in is also include, allowing the appliance to present itself as storage servers to Symantec's NetBackup.