How to Choose and Benchmark a NAS

Continued from page: 3

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Review: LevelOne GNS 8000B

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Cheapest of the lot, the LevelOne GNS 8000B was the only NAS box in the shootout to ship with a redundant power supply. It was also the NAS with the slowest processor, an Intel Celeron M 1.3 GHz. Plus, it had 512 MB RAM and a total storage capacity of 2 TB. However, its usable storage capacity comes down to around 1.3 TB, with the rest being used up for data protection. The NAS has an LCD panel, which apart from displaying information, also lets you configure its IP address. Then, of course, it has Web based management, which is pretty easy to use. It has hot swappable hard drives, and unlike many other vendors, who insist that you need to plug in a hard drive from them only, in this one, you can plug in one on your own. So if (God forbid), one of the hard drives crashes, you're not at the vendor's mercy to get yourself a replacement. The NAS supports file systems like NFS, FTP, AppleTalk and provides DHCP and event logs. Authentication is very simple and can be done in just 3 steps. This NAS supports ADS and LDAP based authentication, as also RAID levels 5, 0, 1, and 10, and comes pre-configured with level 5. You can't install an anti virus on it, so it has to rely on an external anti-virus server for protection. On the down side, it does not support file screening, so you can't control unwanted file extensions from being stored on it. It can back up data to tape, DVD and even supports snapshots.

NetBench

^ IOMeter: I/Os per second

The NAS gave consistent performance in all the tests. Being an entry-level NAS, it's not meant to handle a very large number of clients. So the maximum throughput it gave in NetBench was 239 Mbps, and that too with only five clients. Beyond five clients, its performance dipped a little at 10 clients, but interestingly it picked up again at 15 clients, resulting in 238 Mbps throughput. It wasn't able to handle the load beyond 15 clients and its throughput dropped continuously. In IOMeter, its performance is better with smaller performance requests. So whether it was a random or sequential read or write request we sent to the NAS, the maximum IOs per second for 64k requests were always higher than 128k. Its performance in both sequential reading and writing is much better than in random. Among other NAS boxes also, this one gave better performance in random reads and writes for 128k requests.

Being an entry-level NAS, don't expect to do lots of file transfers to it. It took the longest to copy a 100 GB mix of various files, at 101 minutes. The same time reduced to half when we compressed these 100 GB files into a single ISO image. Overall, this is a good choice for very small setups.

Price: Rs 98,500 (5 yrs warranty) Contact: Minds (India), Delhi, Tel: 09818299663 E-mail: jerry.albert@level1.co.in  SMS Buy 130221 to 6677

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