Infortrend EonStor GSe Pro 3016T review

InforTrend's GSe Pro 3000 series of storage appliances aim to deliver a versatile storage solution to SMEs at an affordable price. Along with NAS and IP SAN services, they can link up with a range of cloud storage providers including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and OpenStack Swift.

On review, we have the top-of-the-line GSe Pro 3016T which sports 16 hot-swap drive bays supporting LFF and SFF SATA hard disks or SSDs. Costs are kept down as the appliance has a single controller powered by a 6-core 2.2GHz Xeon D-1531 CPU and partnered by 8GB of DDR4 cache which can be boosted to 64GB.

The controller comes with four embedded Gigabit data ports and offers a good choice of extra port options. The two module bays support 2- and 4-port host boards allowing you to choose from 1GbE, 10GbE RJ-45 or SFP+, 40GbE QSPF+, 8/16Gbps FC, 10GbE FCoE and 12Gbps SAS3.

The appliance has a huge expansion potential and can manage up to seven JB 3060 60-bay expansion shelves for a total of 436 drives. The only catch is the expansion ports aren't embedded on the controller so you'll have to use the second module bay to fit the SAS3 host board.

Infortrend EonStor GSe Pro 3016T: Deployment and management

For testing, we installed sixteen 2GB LFF SATA hard disks in the sturdy metal drive carriers and connected the dedicated Gigabit management port to the lab network. You have two management choices: the appliance presents its own web interface or you can use the free EonOne app which manages multiple appliances from one interface.

In either case, on first contact they fire up a basic setup wizard which runs through creating a RAID array, storage pool and volumes. You can map the volume to selected data ports and enable file sharing data services such as SMB/CIFS, FTP and NFS.

Each data port must be set for NAS file level or iSCSI block level access modes. Choose a quiet time to modify them though, as changing a channel mode forces a controller reboot which takes around three minutes.

Along with all the usual RAID suspects, the appliance offers a good range of storage features. Along with thin provisioning support, you can designate volumes as WORM (write once read many) for file-level access, set a retention period in years and enable a compliance mode where files cannot be deleted during this period.

Infortrend EonStor GSe Pro 3016T: Storage features

The price includes a standard snapshot license supporting 64 per volume and 128 per system which can be increased to 256 and 4,096 respectively. Volume snapshots can be run on-demand or scheduled to occur as often as every 10 minutes and data recovery is simply a matter of choosing a snapshot and mounting it as a new volume.

Volumes can be mirrored on the same appliance as the standard license enables four replications per volume and 16 per system. Remote replication is also available and supports block level replication and file level Rsync operations.

Workflows are a great feature of the web console as these present a range of tasks and run a wizard to help configure them. Choices include creating a volume and mapping it to a LUN, setting up a shared folder, configuring volume replication and scheduling folder synchronisations.

Cloud storage can be employed for caching, tiering or backup operations. Once a cloud gateway connection has been created, you can assign cloud-integrated volumes to any of these three tasks.

Infortrend EonStor GSe Pro 3016T: Storage apps

The appliance offers plenty of extra apps including local anti-virus scanning plus LDAP, proxy, Syslog and VPN servers. The File Explorer app loads a separate web portal where users can view files and folders their account has access permissions for, and upload to or download from them.

SyncCloud synchronizes folders with cloud storage providers such as Dropbox, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3. We tested with Dropbox and signed in to our account, went to the Developers page, created a new app and made a note of the token generated.

From the SyncCloud web portal, we selected Dropbox, entered our account ID plus token and chose folder pairs for synchronization. On completion, any files we placed in the cloud or on the appliance were synchronized.

One to avoid at the moment is InforTrend's NVR video surveillance app as its web portal wouldn't work on Edge, Chrome, IE11 or Firefox and the VMS remote client app failed to run on our Windows 10 test desktop. We raised these issues with InforTrend's support and were advised that this app is still under development.

Infortrend EonStor GSe Pro 3016T: Performance

InforTrend supplied the system with two dual-port 10GbE SFP+ host boards which we used to hook up a Xeon Scalable Windows Server 2016 system. NAS performance is on the money with a mapped share returning sequential Iometer read and write rates both of 9.2Gbits/sec and the same speeds for random operations.

We upped the pressure with a second Windows server system connected to the other host board and saw cumulative sequential reads and writes ramp up to 18.5Gbits/sec and 18.3Gbits/sec. We did note, however, that connecting both servers to the same host board dropped cumulative speeds down to 14.9Gbits/sec and 12.5Gbits/sec.

IP SAN speeds are equally impressive with a 1TB target delivering raw sequential read and write rates of 9.1Gbits/sec and 8.9Gbits/sec with the latter dropping slightly to 7.1Gbits/sec for random writes. Swapping to a dual-port 10GbE MPIO link returned sequential reads and writes of 18.1Gbits/sec and 17.7Gbits/sec.

Infortrend EonStor GSe Pro 3016T: Verdict

It may lack dual controllers but the EonStor GSe Pro 3016T still delivers plenty of storage capabilities for the price, making it a great choice for SMEs. InforTrend's NVR app is the joker in the pack but other than this, the appliance provides an impressive range of cloud-enabled features and data protection tools teamed up with impeccable NAS and IP SAN performance.

Verdict

The GSe Pro 3016T offers SMEs a great big pile of network storage at a very affordable price. Integration with cloud storage providers adds extra level of versatility and it supports a choice selection of high-performance data ports

Chassis: 3U rack

Storage: 16 x SATA LFF/SFF hot-swap drive bays

Power: 2 x 530W hot-plug PSUs with cooling fans

Single controller with the following:

CPU: 2.2GHz 6-core Intel Xeon D-1531

Memory: 8GB DDR4 cache (max 64GB) with capacitor/Flash memory

Array support: RAID 0, 1 (0+1), 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, 60

Host interfaces: 4 x 1GbE, 2 x host board slots

Network: 1GbE management port

Expansion: Optional host board with 2 x SAS3 ports

Power: 2 x 460W hot-plug PSUs

Management: Web browser, EonOne