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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Swift Performance

The CyberStore delivered top NAS speeds over Gigabit with copies of a 2.52GB video clip to a Dell PowerEdge R515 Opteron 4100 server returning read and write speeds 105MB/sec. Copying the file using the FileZilla FTP client saw these speeds increase slightly to 107MB/sec.

IP SAN performance is nothing to sniff at either with Iometer reporting top raw read and write speeds of 113MB/sec. We logged a second Opteron 4100 server on to another target and Iometer reported a cumulative throughput of 226MB/sec for both servers showing no contention for resources was occurring.

Broadberry 4

Good SNMP monitoring tools allow you to keep a close eye on appliance performance

The RAID card also supports LSI's CacheCade technology and this can be enabled as and when required. Costing 850, Broadberry offers an SSD caching kit which comprises the CacheCade license and a pair of 240GB OCZ Vertex3 SSDs.

Once enabled, CacheCade monitors traffic and transparently copies hot data to the mirrored SSDs for faster access. The original data is retained on the existing volumes so won't be lost if the CacheCade or drives fail for any reason.

Overall, the CyberStore 424DSS is a versatile appliance that has most storage angles covered. NAS, IP SAN and FC SAN support are standard and dont cost extra, it offers good performance and has a huge expansion potential.

ITPRO Value award

Verdict

Broadberry’s hardware platform and the Open-E DSS software are a versatile combination which supports NAS, IP SAN and FC SAN operations straight from the box. It’s good value as licensing is only based on capacity and there’s room to grow with demand.

Chassis: 4U rack Drive bays: 24 x hot-swap LFF bays Power: 2 x 1200W hot-plug supplies Motherboard: Supermicro X8DT3-LN4F CPU: 2.4GHz E5620 Xeon (max 2) Memory: 24GB DDR3 OS Storage: 2 x 8GB Kingston SSDNow mirrored SATA drives Data storage: 6 x 300GB Seagate SAS 2 drives (max 24) RAID: LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-4i4e with 512MB cache and BBU Array support: RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 Network: 4 x embedded Gigabit Expansion: 4 x PCI-e slots, 2 x PCI Management: Console, web browser Software: Open-E DSS v6 preinstalled with 16TB license

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.