Review : Easy branch office storage consolidation
Date : 03 11 2008 Category : Technology
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Dave Bailey, IT Week, Wednesday 12 March 2008 at 00:00:00
EMC's AX4 array delivers flexible networked storage to mid-sized firms and branch offices
Launched in January, EMC's Clariion AX4 storage system is aimed at small and medium-sized business and enterprise branch office IT managers who want to rationalise their storage infrastructures and set up an easily manageable storage system for archiving and disaster recovery. Firms can choose from a range of connectivity options. Those wishing to integrate using standard Gigabit Ethernet switching over copper can use the iSCSI version of the AX4, while those having fast optical fibre connections may wish to deploy an AX4 with 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) connectivity. EMC supports HP-UX, IBM-AIX, Linux, Netware, Solaris, VMware, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows Server 2003 operating systems, and the AX4 can also be accessed through VMware's VMotion, VMware HA and Site Recovery packages. The AX4 array hard disks can be either high-performance Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) devices or lower cost, higher capacity Serial ATA-II (Sata-II) drives. The 15,000rpm SAS drives come in 146GB and 400GB versions, while the 10,000rpm Sata-II drives are available in 400GB, 750GB and 1TB versions. IT Week's review system consisted of one 2U iSCSI version of the AX4, called a disk array enclosure (DAE), which had 12 146GB SAS drives, and a single 2U AX4 FC version, called a disk processor enclosure (DPE), which had 12 drives consisting of six 146GB SAS drives and six 750GB Sata-II drives. With its ability to support both SAS and Sata-II drives in the same enclosure, the AX4 enables firms to create two-tier storage architectures where frequently used data can be stored on the higher performing SAS drives and less important data on the Sata-II drives. Both DAE and DPE had dual storage controllers, and these are hot swappable, as are the disk drives, power supplies, fans and standby power supplies. The DAE had two management network ports and four iSCSI ports, and was connected to the DPE through two 4Gbit/s FC connections. We also had a single 1U standby power supply that we connected to the DAE through a modem link. The maximum number of drives that can be used in the array is 60, so if the new 1TB drives are used, five AX4 arrays can be stacked together to give a maximum capacity of 60TB. For our test, we attached two standard Intel servers, each fitted with two 3.2GHz Intel Xeon dual-core processors and 2GB of system memory, with one running Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition and the other Windows 2000 Server....
