While the iSCSI-based Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System tested by NetworkWorld\'s reviewer delivered as promised with respect to its high-performance claims, reviewer Logan Harbaugh expressed some reservations concerning usability and integration issues.

First, the good news: Harbaugh found the claim of 288,000 I/Os/sec and 1.1GBps throughput to be the case, whether with four four-port 1GBps Ethernet or multiple 10GB Ethernet adapters.

Configuring the cluster was a simple matter, Harbaugh discovered, done largely by the system itself, which connected the second Sun Storage 7410 and adding it to the cluster. He was not altogether happy with the behavior of the iSCSI initiators in failover mode, as they lost the connection and had to be manually reconnected to the iSCSI volumes.

There were also issues involving the testing of the controllers in clustered configuration, as the administrative interface froze, and there were spurious reports of drive failures and of the ILOM interface. These Harbaugh attributes to a peculiarity of the specific unit Sun sent for testing.

Because of the above mentioned issue, the test was conducted on a single controller, removed from the test bed. Harbaugh remarks that the requirement of a different network for each port on the controller is a somewhat clumsy arrangement as it could involve as many as 16 controllers should one elect to use all available slots for four-port gigabit cards. This makes for difficulty in managing the pool of servers in the case of any need for moving servers around, he observes. Still, he terms performance of the single controller system "excellent."

Though the test situation did not allow for sufficient traffic to max out the aggregated connection, the controller managed an average of 67MPps throughput per gigabit connection, Harbaugh reports. Extrapolating from this result suggests that, indeed, Sun's throughput claims for the Sun Storage 7410 are justified, he continues.

Despite having four gigabit Ethernet connections across NetworkWorld's IOmeter-driven tests, Harbaugh notes that it was not possible to move CPU utilization on the Sun Storage 7410 system above 3% with the average of 1,600 IO/sec on each of the four connections. This lends credence to Sun's claim that, the system can support the 30 or 40 servers necessary to generate 288,000 IO/sec maximum.

With respect to management issues, however, Harbaugh found this to be a somewhat complex matter, requiring two separate consoles used to run the system: an admin console accessible through the Web interface on the primary iSCSI port; and an ILOM console accessible through either SSH or a serial terminal. The ILOM console was particularly troublesome, the reviewer found, as it frequently crashed both Internet Explorer and Firefox during testing.

Harbaugh liked the business analytics section of the GUI-based admin interface, which contains very useful monitoring tools that provide the ability to drill down to specific interfaces, network or storage protocols, as long as you're willing to dedicate one of the iSCSI ports to the admin console. Reports are available in a very wide variety of formats, with many variations: network I/O as a raw number, by port, by type of protocol or by source, for instance. He adds that there are similar reports for disk IO, overall storage utilization, and more. Historical data is available as well, and the amount of storage used for logging can be adjusted to keep data for longer or shorter periods of time.

One caveat that Harbaugh mentions is the lack of an automatic update process. Updating the Sun Storage 7410 controller software required downloading a 487MB file and manually uploading it to each controller, then rebooting (which takes over 3 minutes), he points out. As a result of updating, all security certificates were invalid, of course, which then required several steps on either IE or Firefox every time the console was accessed from a new system.

Harbaugh found the storage features of the Sun Storage 7410 -- remote and local replication over synchronous or asynchronous connections, snapshots and mirroring of volumes -- sufficient but not exceptional. He was not happy with a user's inability to expand the 7410 with any parts than those from Sun, though the claim is made that industry standard parts are used in its construction. Using other than Sun parts invalidates the warranty, he notes. Further, the Storage Management Initiative – Specification (SMI-S) developed by the Storage Networking Industry Association to promote interoperability between SAN products is not supported. The reviewer also bridles a bit at Sun's imposing yearly maintenance fees in order to provide future software features.

Harbaugh's final verdict: "The Sun Storage 7410 system is clearly positioned – in terms of price, feature set and performance capacity – to go toe-to-toe with big systems from NetApp and EMC that are designed to support dozens of connected servers simultaneously. While we could not push the box to its capacity, we were impressed by what it could handle in our test environment. That said, Sun could improve the overall usability of the product with some upgraded management tools and wider configuration support in its clustered implementation."

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