Price:
As tested AU$8822
Test configuration:
7 x Western Digital WD1600SD SATA/150 drives (1.12TB raw) in a RAID 5 configuration.
Drive specs:
- Capacity: 160GB
- Rotational speed: 7200 RPM
- Average seek: Read 8.9ms / Write 10.9ms
- Buffer: 8MB
- MTBF: 1,000,000 hours
Like EMC, Promise has chosen to populate the VTrack with SATA drives, which, while less expensive and available in higher capacities than SCSI, are nevertheless not as long lived in high I/O environments. This is of course less an issue in a redundant drive environment -- it just means you will have to swap out dead drives more frequently than with a SCSI-based system.
The design employs quite a bit of redundancy with dual power supplies and dual cooling modules -- the latter are very impressive units each with a pair of large turbine-type fans that move a very large volume of air and there appears to be facilities for battery modules for each cooling module but these were not implemented in the test system.
There are a couple of single points of failure, one being the "Storage Enclosure Processor" and the other the SCSI controller. While the latter has dual Ultra160 SCSI channels they are both implemented on a single controller module.
The controllers have a 256MB cache, expandable up to 512MB, which is battery backed and provides up to 72 hours of protection in the event of a power failure.
Each drive cradle has a pair of status LEDs so it is simple to identify a faulty drive and the front panel of the unit has status and activity indicators for the SCSI channels, controller, and logical drive.
Administration of the VTrack is achieved with a product called WebPAM Professional in conjunction with your Web browser.
Configuring and managing the controller and drive array is very simple and straightforward using WebPAM.
In terms of cost per gig, the VTrack is a very cost effective solution at just AU$7.88 per GB. System Performance, however was not the VTrack's strong suite -- it was the slowest in all the tests and is significantly slower than the other vendors in the large file transfer tests. Having said this, the performance of the VTrack is not actually "bad" and given the low total cost of the unit still represents good value.
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