VTrak makes the leap to SANs easy

Small and medium businesses’ most serious fear when exploring networked storage is that of being sucked into a complicated, expensive, and difficult-to-manage solution. That concern often proves too pessimistic but is nevertheless justified by the complex administration and boutique prices that characterize many SAN solutions.

It’s no surprise, then, that small companies have generally stuck to the easier-to-navigate waters of server-attached storage rather than venturing into the world of SANs. As more vendors offer SMB customers less expensive and easier-to-manage SAN arrays, those concerns are fading.

The VTrak 15200, a recently released iSCSI array from Promise Technology, is one such user-friendly product that combines ease of use and good performance with an attractive price. 

In addition to offering good capacity, sturdy construction, and easy administration tools, the VTrak 15200 also bridges the gap between DAS and SANs with a modular architecture that can easily switch from SCSI to iSCSI connectivity, which makes the unit especially attractive for networked storage newbies.

Not Rocket Science

VTrak 15200’s redundant components and modular structure are easily taken apart without using any tools and without powering off. The back of its 3U box is a mosaic of easily replaceable modules, including a dual fan assembly, dual power supply, and one processor and one I/O controller module.

The 15200’s standard I/O controller mounts two iSCSI ports, plus a serial port and an Ethernet port for CLI and GUI-based administration. One of those modules will host up to 512 MB of automatically saved, battery-protected cache.

Along with this standard controller, Promise offers a compatible SCSI controller that transforms the 15200 into a DAS array, which facilitates connection to any server mounting a recent SCSI adapter. With an easy update (essentially replacing the SCSI module with its iSCSI equivalent), the same array can be promoted to networked storage without data corruption.

The front of this 19-inch, rack-sized unit has room for 15 SATA drives, vertically mounted and easily removable, thanks to smoothly-sliding disk carriers. After I mounted 15 Western Digital WD740 drives, the unit capacity was just a notch above 1TB; for additional capacity, you can mount larger SATA drives or, using proper adapters, less expensive parallel ATA drives.

Mimicking a DAS environment with the VTrak was easy: I slid in the SCSI controller and ran a cable to an Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI adapter mounted on my HP Proliant ML350 server. The array’s two existing LUNs (logical unit numbers) were immediately recognized and subsequently became part of the storage capacity of my Windows 2003 machine.

After partitioning and formatting, I copied some files to those two volumes, then powered down to convert my DAS array to networked storage. I replaced the 15200’s SCSI controller with its original two-port iSCSI module. Then, using the array’s CLI-based management tool, I set those iSCSI ports to IP addresses consistent with my network.

To add iSCSI connectivity to my server, I mounted a QLogic QLA4010 HBA and installed its drivers and the SANSurfer Control management application from Promise’s CD.