Price:
AU$27,990 (14GB drive, 1.022TB, dual-controller configuration)
AU$17,349 (7-drive, 1.022TB, single-controller configuration).
Test Configuration:
14 x Seagate Cheetah ST336605FC Fibre Channel drives (0.514TB raw) in a RAID 5 configuration.
Drive specs:
- Capacity: 36.7GB
- Rotational speed: 10000 RPM
- Average seek: 5.1ms
- Buffer: 4MB
- MTBF: 1,200,000 hours
The test unit had a swag of redundant and hot-swappable components including two RAID controllers with battery-backed cache, dual power supplies, and two fan cooling modules, each with a small battery pack to ensure the enclosure is cooled even if all external power sources fail. This ensures your drives and components do not sit and stew in their own accumulated heat during a catastrophic power failure. The cooling module fans are surprisingly powerful and ensure that large volumes of air circulate around the drives.
While each drive cradle has LEDs to indicate the drive's health and status including online, offline, fail, rebuild, drive identify, and prepare for removal, the SANbloc itself has status indicators for power, shelf faults, LS fault, FC loop open/closed, and FC loop speed.
The drive cradles and other redundant items such as power supply or cooling units are all quite easy to replace, and all items are hot swappable.
Management of the SANbloc is handled via Spheras Storage Director which uses Java RMI for connectivity over the Internet. Spheras is a very powerful utility that allows the user to configure, monitor, and maintain the SANbloc.
Adaptec was unable to provide the Lab with a 1TB implementation of the SANbloc and as a consequence the unit was tested with 14 drives (that amounted to just half a terabyte). For cost-per-GB calculations Adaptec supplied the Lab with pricing on a 14-drive 1.022TB solution rather than the cost as tested. Even so, the SANbloc is quite expensive at AU$27.39 per gigabyte -- but bear in mind that this price included the dual-controller option and 14 smallish drives. We also requested Adaptec supply us with a "best value" 1.022TB system with just a single controller and seven drives and the cost per GB drops dramatically to just AU$16.98 per GB.
Performance on the other hand was strong with the SANbloc the fastest during writes and quite quick at reads as well.
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