Unfortunately the EMC Clariion arrived at the Lab well past the testing deadline. Still we did try to include the unit in our tests but the EMC's Fibre Channel controller and our Adaptec 9210LP Host controller refused to communicate. EMC was unable to source an alternative host controller before the completion of the comparison. We did, however, continue to evaluate the unit but have not obviously included any performance test results.
Price:
As tested AU$11,455
Test Configuration:
3 x Maxtor Maxline Plus II Model 7Y250M0 SATA/150 drives (0.75TB raw) in a RAID 5 configuration.
Drive specs:- Capacity: 250GB
- Rotational speed: 7200 RPM
- Average seek: 9ms
- Buffer: 8MB
- MTBF: 1,000,000 (but only in low I/O secondary storage applications)
Although to be fair, if a drive does die you simply replace it with another relatively inexpensive drive -- so cost wise this may actually be a cheaper alternative than a SCSI-based DAS unit.
The drive cradles are covered by a removable, and lockable, front facia with power and fault status indicators.
The unit has a single controller but there is a dual-controller option available. Likewise, there is only a single power supply but a second redundant power supply is an option. While on redundancy, the connectivity to the server is via a pair of Fibre Channel ports but there is an option for an additional two Fibre Channel ports. In the configuration sent to the Lab there is very little in the way of failover other than the RAID drives and battery-backed cache but should you require, further redundancy can be optioned.
Cooling is excellent with no less than five fans providing airflow to the controller and drive bays, each fan with a baffle to prevent dust entry when the unit is powered down, while the power supply also has a single fan. Should a fan fail it is a simple user-replaceable item.
A Web-based management tool called Navisphere is used to manage the Clariion and while the interface is perhaps not at "pretty" as some of the other vendors it nevertheless has a good deal of functionality.
Cost per GB is reasonable, although given the use of inexpensive SATA drives we would have expected the EMC to be less expensive than the SCSI drive configured HP for example but the EMC was slightly more expensive at AU$15.27.
