Nexsan SATABoy

The SATABoy is an easy to use SAN that's built for reliability and would make an excellent first excursion into SAN territory.

Type: SAN
Storage: 14 SATA discs providing 14TBytes
Raid Controller: single or dual
Connections: 2x4Gb Fibre Channel ports 2xGigabyte iSCSI LAN
Power: Redundant, hot-swappable
Physical Dimensions: 132.5 x 429 x 520 mm
Weight: 38kg

The SATABoy is a 3U SAN storage device that can use up to 14 SATA drives in a RAID 5 array to provide SAN storage divided into any number of logical volumes. Each disk drive is installed in a carrier which slots into the main chassis with a very easy to use locking mechanism. All drives can be hot inserted and removed. Two LED indicators show activity and status.

Around the back of the unit are two redundant hot swappable power supplies complete with battery backup. A pair of LEDs show power and cooling fan status. There is room for two controllers but usually one is sufficient.

Each controller offers one serial console port, two gigabit Ethernet ports and two fibre connectors. A single LED indicates the state of the backup battery and the state of the cache. Both Gigabyte network connectors can be used for iSCSI connections but only port 0 can be used for administration.

When first switched on the system defaults to the slightly unusual IP address of 10.11.12.13, but this isn’t a problem as the supplied IP utility scans for any connected devices and then allows you to set a suitable IP or use DHCP. However, if you don’t want to use the utility you can configure the unit using the serial console connection, or use a workstation on the same sub-net, or configure a fixed route from a workstation to the device.

Once you have the device on the same subnet as the workstation you can simply use a browser for the rest of the configuration. This makes configuration remarkably easy. A quickstart helper walks you through RAID configuration and volume creation. The RAID controller has a cache from 512Mbytes to 2Gbytes depending on the model. First time around initialisation takes 6 hours or so before the system is ready to go. A progress screen shows how far through the system any time consuming process, initialisation, surface scan, rebuild etc, is.

Of course if you want to you can do initial configuration using the standard menus and change or examine the configuration in the same way. You can select RAID level, number of spares and create any number of volumes. In most cases the defaults should be fine.

A single full size volume is created by default unless this would exceed the 2.2TByte limit, which is with a full 14GByte system is generally the case. The 14TByte system under test automatically created six 2.2TByte volumes.

You can view the status of the entire system down to the individual drives that make it up, power supplies, fans and so on, in an easy-to-digest diagram. If anything goes wrong then an alarm sounds and an exclamation mark appears. If a disk fails then the default configuration includes a single hot spare which can be activated before removing the failed drive.

Of course, being a SAN, the RAID disk array simply provides raw storage – how you actually divide the storage up into volumes usable by machines on the network is up to you. Basic volume management is provided – expand, delete, rename - and you can control access to the volumes. Volumes can also be mapped to any of the ports to control the way the bandwidth is used.

You can set various operating parameters to modify the priority any rebuild is given and how often and what sort of operational verification is applied – surface scan or parity. You can also shutdown or reboot the system. If you have multiple controllers installed then a rolling reboot achieves the same result without taking the storage off-line and you can configure failover modes.

There is also a power saving configuration tool called “AutoMAID” which can be used to put individual disks in the array into various power reduction modes after a specified idle time. Of course, parking heads and spinning disks down saves power but it also increases response time so the good news is that you can schedule power saving to non-critical times.

There are lots of status reports and you can arrange for email alerts to be sent. It also supports SNMP.

The SATABoy is remarkably easy to use and built for reliability. It can be installed in a rack ready for use in a few minutes and be providing storage after a few hours of initialisation. Its user interface is perhaps its best feature, providing lots of information and quick and easy reconfiguration. It would make an excellent first excursion into SAN territory for any network admin more used to NAS.

For a discussion of the relative merits of SAN and NAS, see SAN versus NAS.

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Sataboy page