EMC's NAS solution was nearly an "almost ran" in this review as it arrived at the Lab in two deliveries, several days apart, and then with parts missing or the wrong parts supplied. It also uncovered a problem with EMC's training of local technical support staff at LAN Systems -- quite simply it is inadequate and on several occasions we found it necessary to seek support at EMC's support centre in Toronto. While the calls were free and no more difficult than a local call, we feel that EMC has a duty to ensure local support staff are adequately trained.
Setting up the EMC solution is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle -- the dual-controller storage chassis, the AX100 controllers each have a Fibre Channel connector while the NetWin 110 server which provides NAS connectivity to the network only has a single fibre channel connector. To connect both AX100 controllers to the NetWin, a Fibre Channel switch is required and an EMC 3250 VL2E was supplied to do the job. Sadly, we only received two cables and did not receive a third in time for testing so were only able to connect the server to a single AX100 controller. We were informed by the local support staff that this should have no impact on performance.
The AX100 required 2RU, the NetWin 1RU, SmartUPS, another 1RU, and finally the 3250 VL2E another 1 RU for a total of 5RU. Admittedly, you may already have your own Fibre Channel switch but, even so, the EMC requires a lot of a rack space.
On the upside, the AX100 packs a lot of drives into a 2RU chassis, up to 12 SATA drives. Our test unit was configured with five 250GB SATA drives, one of which was reserved as a hot spare, so seven drive bays remain free. With all bays occupied, the EMC machine claims up to 3TB of raw disk space.
The drive cradles themselves are very minimalist and, we must admit, feel flimsy and clumsy particularly when compared to the Apple.
The NetWin is a relatively standard 1RU server with no advanced redundancy features and just a single power supply. The Fibre Channel connectivity is provided by an Emulex PCI-X card; it's a pity EMC did not see fit to provide a dual-channel card for those that don't need a Fibre Channel switch.
The AX100 is a far more substantial unit than the NetWin, and has taken redundancy quite seriously with two of everything: two controllers, two CPUs, two sets of I/O, and two power supplies.
Installation and configuration was more painful than it should have been, if all the components had been supplied from the beginning then the setup would have been a lot smoother.
However, we did experience a problem with the server and were unable to run it's Web-based management software Navisphere. We tried several tricks and none worked so finally the server's operating system was reinstalled via the provided Restore DVD; this fixed the problem.
A software applet is used to initialise the AX100 and from that point on all management is carried out via Navisphere, although the management of the AX100 is a little clumsy because the Web user interface (UI) Navisphere launches a second Web UI in the initial browser and at times you have to scroll about because you cannot view the full AX100 configuration window. It would have made more sense to spawn a new browser window.
Navigation around the UI is straightforward and we found configuring drives and volumes along with the relevant shares to be a simple matter. Bundled software is quite useful with a volume "snapshot" utility and a second, PowerPath, which is certainly worth more attention. PowerPath is in essence an I/O path management tool that intelligently routes I/O to provide multiple paths, load balancing, and path failover should a router die for example. Admittedly, this is overkill for our simple scenario but as your storage network grows PowerPath would become a very useful tool.
The EMC was consistently slower than the other two units, at times by a large margin. Admittedly, the Sun had an advantage over all the other units in terms of onboard memory but the Snap and EMC were similar in configuration and the Snap was significantly faster. In terms of cost per GB the EMC was also quite expensive at AU$32.21/GB, only the Sun had a higher cost per GB.
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