How to Choose and Benchmark a NAS

Continued from page: 4

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Review: HP AIO 400

This is the latest NAS from HP, and is also the most feature rich of the lot. The first thing we noticed about it was its ease of use. You don't need a system administrator to configure it. And if its OS crashes, you can restore it by popping in the accompanying DVD and booting from it. The software does the rest. It automatically configures RAID 5 for you. The box has Windows Storage Server 2003, and also has data protection cum backup software for backing up data to tape, a network share, DVD or another NAS box directory. Other features in data protection include protection of shared folders and taking snapshots. This box supports iSCSI, allowing the NAS box to be integrated into a SAN environment. Plus, it also has tools for Exchange and SQL Server that let you host Exchange or SQL databases on the NAS box. While the total storage capacity of the NAS is 1 TB, the actual available capacity is 692.9 GB. Remaining space is used up by OS and data protection. On the upgradability front, you can't add any more RAM to it. The only way to get more RAM is to upgrade the entire box. The NAS box has a Web interface, which opens a remote desktop of the NAS box on the Web interface and lets you create and manage shares.

NetBench

^ IOMeter: I/Os per second

On the performance front, the maximum throughput we got using NetBench was 203 Mbps and that too with only 5 clients. The throughput started dipping immediately after that, clearly indicating that the product is meant for small workgroups. We repeated the same test on a compressed folder on the NAS, and the maximum throughput rose slightly to 208 Mbps. Basically, the Windows Server caches data on the fly before compressing and saving it in the compressed folder. As the whole process happens in memory, it improves the performance a bit. Our IOMeter test results indicated that the HP NAS is excellent in doing sequential reading of data as compared to sequential writing and random reading/writing. As compared to the other NAS boxes, this one was also a tad better in doing random data writes of 64K data request size. Overall, we noticed that its random reading and writing operations are not too affected by the data request size.

But sequential reads and writes are immensely affected. When transfer requests are increased from 64K to 128K, the sequential reads and writes are reduced by half.

The AiO took 88 minutes to copy 100 GB of data to it, and the same data compressed into an ISO image took only 51 minutes. While working with the NAS, we observed that access to its management interface from the remote desktop was a little slow. We further investigated and found lots of management services running on the box. This was the reason for the slow-responding interface.

We stopped a few of these services and found that access to the management interface became faster. We're not sure whether it also improves the overall performance of the NAS as we didn't get sufficient time to check it. Perhaps HP should look at this more closely. This was also the costliest NAS in the shootout.

Price: Rs 315,000 (1 yr warranty)  Contact: Hewlett Packard India, Bangalore Tel: 25051692 E-mail: neeraj.matiyani@hp.com  SMS Buy 130222 to 6677

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