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In the storage world, it's all starting to come together.
In the past, solution providers had the option of pushing either block-based SAN products or file-based NAS devices to customers looking for the right solution. Now, more and more vendors are coming out with storage units that can handle both.
Unified storage combines both SAN and NAS in a single storage device, often also including iSCSI functionality. For this review, CRN Test Center engineers examined the Celerra NS20, a new entry-level multiprotocol storage platform from EMC.
While the Test Center's NS20 unit came from the qualification lab, it contained the general-availability code that was released to manufacturing. According to EMC, the system was as close as possible to the units that began shipping on Aug. 14, when the NS20 became generally available.
As an entry-level platform, the Celerra is ideal for installations requiring less than 20 Tbytes of IP storage capacity. The Celerra NS20 provides Network File System (NFS) and Common Internet File System (CIFS) file shares, and supports NFSv2, NFSv3 and NFSv4. The Celerra allows virtual provisioning, a feature that makes the unit's capacity seem bigger than it really is by allocating storage only when data is being written to the device. NS20 supports LDAP message signing and can join the CIFS server to a Windows domain using LDAP. Snapshots of the file system and iSCSI LUNs can be created for backup and data recovery. The Celerra also ships with eight optional Fibre Channel ports for host connectivity.
While "entry-level" is often synonymous with being a fixed solution with limited configuration options, that's not the case with the Celerra NS20. EMC...