Infortrend EonStor ESDS S16S-R2240-4 review

InforTrend's latest high-speed DAS appliance provides a simple method of expanding storage for multiple application servers. In this exclusive review, Dave Mitchell hooks it up to the labs' servers to test performance and see how easy it is to deploy.

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Using the Iometer utility configured with four disk workers, a 64KB transfer request size and 100 outstanding I/Os we saw the Dell server return impressive raw read and write throughputs of 800MB/s and 685MB/s respectively.

A handy performance monitor provides a real time view of read and write activity for each physical hard disk.

A handy performance monitor provides a real time view of read and write activity for each physical hard disk.

A handy performance monitor provides a real time view of read and write activity for each physical hard disk.

With the Broadberry server connected to the same controller and using the second partition we saw cumulative read and write speeds of 1308MB/s and 712MB/s. This showed some contention for controller resources was occurring, although these speeds are impressive nonetheless.

For real world performance we saw drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip to and from the Dell server return speeds of over 400MB/s. Our collection of small files was also handled well as a 22.4GB folder of 10,500 files was copied from the partition to the server at a rate of 160MB/s.

The EonStor S16S-R2240-4 scores very well for performance as only expensive 8Gbit/s FC SAN appliances will be able to match these speeds. It's also good value, although a close competitor is HP's StorageWorks P2000 G3 appliance.This is very similarly priced and, amongst its many connection options, supports 6Gbit/s direct attach SAS. Expansion and resilience are just as good, although the EonStor's larger 3U chassis does provide a higher base capacity than the StorageWorks's 2U head unit making it better value.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

The EonStor acquitted itself well in our lab tests showing performance equal to more costly 8Gbit/s FC SAN appliances. It’s easy to deploy, provides excellent fault tolerance and expansion potential and it's good value too.

Chassis: 3U rack Storage: 16 x SAS drive bays Power: 2 x 530W hot-plug supplies Two hot-swap RAID controllers each with the following specification: Memory: 2GB cache (expandable to 4GB) with battery backup and CacheSafe Array support: RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, 60, JBOD, global hot-spare Host interfaces: 4 x 6Gbit/s SAS ports Network: Gigabit Ethernet management port Expansion: 6Gbit/s SAS port Management: Web browser, Infortrend SANWatch Suite

Dave Mitchell
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.