Broadberry CyberStore 424DSS review

This unified network storage product combines NAS, IP SAN and FC SAN operations and has great expansion potential. Dave Mitchell finds out if the affordable platform is the perfect all-rounder.

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Fault Tolerance

Fault tolerance is good as this 4U Supermicro based system has two 1200W hot-plug power supplies and the Open-E software is installed on a mirrored pair of Kingston 8GB SSDs. Broadberry advised us it chose these as they have a much higher MTBF than the USB sticks you commonly see Open-E deployed on.

The appliance's quad Gigabit ports can be placed in fault tolerant or load balanced teams and you have support for MPIO (multi-path I/O) as well. Three spare PCI-e slots are up for grabs and Broadberry offers a selection of Intel Gigabit and dual-port 10-Gigabit cards.

The appliance was supplied with six 3TB Seagate SAS 2 drives preconfigured in a RAID-6 array. Broadberry charges 299 for each extra 3TB SAS 2 drive and it expects to have 4TB drives certified soon.

The management web interface is easy enough to use and you start by creating volumes. Each RAID array is classed as a volume group and within these you create logical volumes and decide whether they are for NAS, IP SAN or, with an appropriate HBA installed, FC SAN usage.

Broadberry 2

iSCSI targets are assigned a LUN and you can use CHAP authentication for host access control

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.