Infrant ReadyNAS X6

Reviews: Networking

Infrant ReadyNAS X6

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Richard Poelling
Brian
Infrant
Dec. 7, 2005

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Introduction

Storage, you are an evil mistress! How else can you best describe a concept that you never want to fully use yet invariably will? This seems to hold true for most things, from houses, to rooms, to even our computer systems. IT managers from large and small enterprises are locked in the same struggle you are as you try to cram that last pair of socks into the drawer. Everyone wants to get value from their investments, whether they may be a new 120GB hard drive or a new 2TB data center server. It is this never-ending battle between space and cost.

With all that said, the price of storage has dropped considerably over the past several years. Although larger hard drives can be had for less money, technology, as usual, has found ways to eat all that extra space just as fast. Sure you can get that 160GB hard drive for cheap, but that new game you got now takes up 5GB rather than the 500MB it did just a few years ago. Your only choice is to try to future-proof yourself as much as possible without breaking the bank. Sure, we would all like to be able to walk out and add 1 TB of storage to our systems without having refinanced the house.

Even now, you can buy 300, 400 and 500 GB hard drives. Add one to your system and you are good to go for a little while longer. But what about backing up all that information? 400 GB is a lot of stuff to lose. This leads to redundant disks, which many motherboards support these days in the form of an onboard RAID controller. So as you begin to build more and more into your computer you realize that everyone seems to want access to all this great information you have on your system, so now you have to worry about sharing it out to the other computer systems. What started out as a simple expansion can quickly turn into a networking nightmare. If you want to add lots of storage and network access, your answer lies in NAS, short for Network Attached Storage. Think of it as a network fileserver without all the extra crap!

One of the players in this NAS market is a company by the name of Infrant Technologies. Founded in 2001, they have set out to create a usage-specific processor which they call an NSP (Network Storage Processor); their goal being a dedicated box for the sole purpose of serving out storage to the network. To this end they have created the software which is aptly named RAIDiator. The software is now in its second incarnation as the RAIDiator 2. To see if all these bad plays on words are worth the effort, Infrant has been gracious enough to send me their latest NAS offering, the X6. The X6 is the successor to their ReadyNAS600 which utilized standard RAID architecture to serve out storage to the masses. The new X6 utilizes Infrant's proprietary X-RAID technology to allow the user to expand the array on the fly. How well this works is precisely what I intend to find out, so let's roll up our sleeves and dig in!

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks
Page 3: Installation
Page 4: Hard Drives
Page 5: Services
Page 6: Testing
Page 7: Testing: DiskBench
Page 8: Testing: Iometer
Page 9: Quality, Security & Error Reporting
Page 10: Conclusion

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