Network Appliance FAS250
The Network Appliance FAS250 (Fabric Attached Storage) was the largest unit we tested at 3RU and weights a hefty 35kg. The front panel is dominated by 14 drive bays. The drives are loaded vertically to house more drives.
To remove a disk you have to press down on its release mechanism and gently slide the disk out. The cradles are quite large and they don't come out very smoothly.
The FAS uses 72GB Seagate Fibre Channel (FC) drives. There is also an option to go for the 144GB FC hard drives that would increase the total storage capacity can to 2TB. This was the only unit to use FC drives and that partly explains the high price.
Located at the rear is a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports, a console port, a Fibre Channel port, which will enable you to connect this unit to a third-party Fibre Channel switch, and two redundant power supplies. There is also a FC switch that sets the Fibre Channel link speed to 1Gbps or 2Gbps.
From the rear you can also remove the CPU module. There are two pull handles that you have to pull outwards to release the 25cm CPU module. There is also provision for a second CPU. On this module was a BroadCom BCM 125 MIPS processor running at 600MHz and a single 512MB memory module. Also on there was a battery charger for an NVRAM card that wasn't fitted. On the back of the mainboard was a 128MB CompactFlash card that stores the FAS OS.
Getting the unit up and running could be made quicker and easier by using a utility similar to the one used by the Snap Server. Instead we had to use the console port to connect up to the FAS. After configuring the network settings of the FAS using Hyper Terminal we were then able to launch an Internet browser and further configure the FAS from there.
The FAS250 was easily the fastest NAS under test mainly due to the FC hard disks it uses. The FAS250 by default uses RAID 4. The Data ONTAP file system will not let you select a RAID configuration only the number of disks you want to use, it pretty much does the rest. During our testing we created a volume with two disks then later four disks to see if there would be a performance improvement. We didn't notice much of an improvement from the already fast transfer rates.
| Product | Network Appliance FAS250 |
| Price | Approx $35,000 |
| Vendor | Network Appliance |
| Phone | 1800 027 722 |
| Web | www.netapp.com |
| Interoperability |  ½ |
| Supports all standard protocols plus Fibre Channel and iSCSI. | |
| Futureproofing |  |
| Excellent expansion potential from dual CPU, SCSI, 14 drive bays | |
| ROI |  ½ |
| Expensive but includes solid performance and extensive features. | |
| Service |  ½ |
| 3-year 24 x 7 warranty. | |
| Rating |  ½ |
