Nexsan Technologies' SATABeast sets new highs for storage density by
packing 21TB of raw storage into a 4U (7-inch) chassis. The SATABeast also has a couple of innovative features that should make it
an excellent target for long-term data storage and disk-to-disk
backup.
A fully loaded SATABeast, with 21TB of
raw capacity, costs $42,100, a price that should appeal to IT managers looking
for relatively inexpensive storage. And with SATA (Serial ATA) hard drives
already at 750GB in size and soon to hit the 1TB mark, we expect the SATABeast
to jump up to 42TB in capacity in the near future.
Nexsan has recently added RAID 6
(dual-parity RAID) to the SATABeast, an extremely important feature that should
make maintenance of the unit considerably easier. RAID 6 volumes can survive a
two-drive failure, a great safety feature in a system with so many hard
drives.
We were able to add the RAID 6
capabilities to our SATABeast unit by simply updating the SATABeast firmware.
(Units shipping now will come with RAID 6 support.)
After the firmware upgrade, we were
able to use the SATABeast's Web-based GUI to create RAID 6 volumes. The GUI has
multiple sections and tabs that were a little confusing at first, but it didn't
take us long to create and manage new RAID sets. In fact, we found the SATABeast
relatively easy to set up and configure in general.
However, there is a trade-off for the
unit's high density.
To install the hard drives, we had to
remove the faceplate and the top cover of the chassis. Drives are loaded
vertically into the SATABeast, from the top of the device. With most RAID
arrays, drives are loaded from the front and are more easily accessible.
Taking care of fallen drives is not a
fun chore with the SATABeast, but this inconvenience is the price you pay for
having such high storage density in a small form factor, and the trouble is
ultimately worth it.
Thankfully, though, the SATABeast's
RAID 6 support and two hot-spare drives will save IT managers from having to
open up the SATABeast chassis for maintenance for a fairly long time.
Another capability that will appeal to
IT managers looking for long-term storage solutions is Nexsan's AutoMAID
functionality, which puts unused hard drives in idle mode. (The "MAID" in
AutoMAID stands for Massive Array of Idle Disks.) AutoMAID is a useful feature
that will also help to prolong the life of the drives in the SATABeast. AutoMAID
runs in the background and can put RAID sets, as well as individual disks, into
idle mode.
The AutoMAID power savings capabilities
were fairly easy to configure on our test unit. Using the Web-based interface,
we were able to set up three different idle thresholds for our drives. In the
first idle mode, the SATABeast parks the hard drive heads of drives that have
not been accessed recently. If the drive remains idle beyond the second
threshold, the SATABeast reduces the rotational speed of the drive. After the
third and final threshold, the SATABeast can completely stop the spinning of an
idle drive.
The SATABeast has dual controller
blades, each containing twin 2G-bps Fibre Channel ports and a single iSCSI port.
We liked the flexibility that the iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity options
afford, making it easy to hook multiple and different kinds of servers into the
SATABeast.
Looking at the chassis, it is apparent
that Nexsan engineers have expended a lot of effort to make sure that adequate
airflow runs through the SATABeast—hard drives will remain cool even when the
device is running at high utilization.
One thing Nexsan hasn't been able to
overcome is the noise factor: One consequence of SATABeast's impressive storage
density is the excessive noise that is created by the cooling fans. This should
not be a concern when the SATABeast is used in a data center rack, but it will
make life miserable for anyone who has to sit next to it full
time.
