Content area
Full Text
There are never enough hours in the day, pages in a notebook or gigabytes on the LAN. Whether it's users storing their work files on the network or enterprise databases growing out of control, disk space requirements grow to fill the existing spindles faster than you can bring new drives online.
One way to bring more storage onto the LAN is to add disk space to existing file/print servers.
Another is to add more file/print servers. The former option is the least expensive, but it can be problem-atic if servers are reaching the limits of expandability or throughput. The latter choice can be expensive in hardware, software (including client licenses) and management effort.
A third option-the subject of this test-is to add storage by adding file server appliances.
Although costlier than adding bare drives to a standard server, file servers offer several advantages. They're optimized for storage: You're not wasting money on video controllers, keyboards or other hardware or software.They're easier to set up and administer, particularly in multiprotocol networks. They have their downsides, too: Not all models have the same high-availability functions found on most PC servers, and their scalability options can be quite limited. But for businesses looking for affordable enterprise or departmental LAN storage, appliances are an attractive option.
We looked at two midrange and one high-end file servers; these are higher-capacity models than we looked at back in March. The Quantum Snap Server 4000 and Maxtor MaxAttach 4000 are compact servers capable of delivering gigabytes on demand; their primary benefits are affordability and ease of management. The Network Appliance F720 Filer is a much larger unit with a higher price tag-but its claim to fame is true enterprise-scale fault tolerance combined with easy expandability.
Capacity
All three servers we tested offered a lot of storage capacity in a rack-mount configuration, with the Maxtor server taking top honors in both raw capacity and rack density.
The physically smallest unit is the 1U (1.75-inch) high Maxtor Max- Attach 4000. The unit we received contained four Maxtor DiamondMax 40- GB EIDE hard drives, for a total raw capacity of 160 GB; it was configured as a mirrored set of two spanned disks (RAID 1), which left a total usable capacity of 71.4 GB....