Of the four units supplied only the Snap Server and Sun StorEdge are "single box" solutions. The Sun machine is substantially larger than the Snap with a 2RU case, and although it is twice the size of the Snap we were surprised that the Sun only manages another two drive bays for a total of six bays. The unit supplied to the Lab was configured with six 140GB Ultra SCSI 320 drives, five of which were in a RAID 5 configuration amounting to 560GB, and the sixth retained as a hot spare. Sun currently does not have higher capacity drives and so this is the internal expansion limit for the 5210.
External storage is another matter, up to three expansion units can be attached to the 5210; each with 12 drives for a total of 42 drives and around 6TB of raw unconfigured disk space or 4TB in a similar configuration to the 5210.
There are a pair of hot swap redundant 500W power supplies and the PCI-X Ultra SCSI 320 RAID controller includes battery backup for its 128MB of cache. With a total of six PCI-X slots, only one of which is used, there is plenty of expansion potential although we should note that three of the slots are only half height.
Like the Snap, the 5210 arrived with a preconfigured RAID 5 drive array but the Sun also has a hot spare. And, like the Snap the 5210, it has a simple Java Web interface for configuration and administration.
The Interface appears bland when compared to the Snap but we found it looked cleaner and its tree structure was very simple to navigate.
Interoperability is very good and in general on par with the Snap although the Snap offers Windows server emulation while the Sun does not, and Sun's iSCSI support is not due until June this year. The Sun has a Journaling file system which writes the Journals directly to disk, this precludes the loss of data that would occur if the NVRAM head unit of other vendors NAS should fail.
Also standard on the Sun is a user configurable File Checkpoint feature which only duplicates disk blocks when they are modified and also only duplicates the modified sections of files thus reducing disk space required and the time taken to create the checkpoint.
The Sun is not an inexpensive NAS, its cost per GB is the highest of all the units tested but thankfully its performance does live up to the high price tag and, let's face it, Ultra SCSI 320 drives are significantly more expensive than the PATA and SATA drives featured in two of the other NAS. In almost every test the Sun had significantly higher throughput than the other NAS, the only exception was in the simultaneous read/write test where the SnapServer was slightly faster. However, we have no doubt that if the test were repeated with a much higher load and more clients the Sun would pull ahead of the SnapServer.
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