Fujitsu Eternus CS800 S3 Entry review

An affordable data deduplication unit for SMBs. Our testing showed the Eternus CS800 S3 can help make businesses make big storage savings.

Simple installation

We found installation simple with a wizard guiding us through configuration and network port setup. The appliance has six Gigabit ports and five of them can be kept separate or bonded together in load balanced, redundant teams. The sixth port is for service and maintenance functions only.

Now you can get down to creating network shares which we found to be swift. Up to 128 CIFS or NFS shares are supported, they can be public or private and for user access control, you can enable workgroup or AD modes.

Deduplication can be enabled on a per share basis and once set it can't be removed. However, you can specify backup windows for a share during which time deduplication is disabled.

The web interface provides plenty of status information for deduplication, RAID and network activity. You can view the current data reduction ratio, keep an eye on storage usage and set up alerts that can be emailed to multiple recipients.

Fujitsu CS800 - Data reduction ratio

Fujitsu CS800 - Data reduction ratio

The appliance delivered excellent data reduction ratios during our deduplication tests

Overall, we found the Fujitsu Eternus CS800 S3 to be easy to deploy, the backup performance was on a par with other SMB deduplication products and the price includes all features as standard. For this reason we have no hesitation in recommending it.

ITPRO Recommended award

IT Pro Verdict

Verdict

The Eternus CS800 S3 Entry is better value than many competing SMB deduplication offerings as you get a much bigger repository for a similar price. It’s easy to deploy, the use of NAS shares means it supports virtually all backup software products and it delivered top results in our data reduction lab tests.

Chassis: Fujitsu Primergy RX300 S6 2U rack server CPU: 2.4GHz E5620 Xeon Memory: 24GB DDR3 Storage: 2 x 300GB SAS, 10 x 500GB SATA SFF hot-swap hard disks RAID: Fujitsu SAS 5/6 PCI-e card with 512MB cache and BBU Array support: Storage preconfigured in RAID-6 array Network: 6 x Gigabit (5 x data, 1 x service) Power: 2 x 800W hot-plug supplies Management: Web browser Warranty: 1yr NBD advanced replacement

Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.