[Kevin OBrien]

The iXsystems Titan iX-316J is a 16 3.5" bay, JBOD storage expansion shelf. The JBOD has become a permanent fixture of the Storage Review lab, enabling us to directly connect SATA or SAS drives to a host compute system via LSI 9207-8e SAS expander. The iX-316J can be used in a variety of use cases, ranging from accepting up to 64TB of SATA drives, all the way up to the speedier 2.5" 10K and 15K drives, should the user choose to go that route. In this review we look at three different sets of hard drives, clearly illustrating the performance vs. capacity trade-offs that occur with modern enterprise hard drives.


iXsystems Titan 316J JBOD Review

[chris.wilkes]

Seriously, Raid10 how, software Raid10? What software Raid. Can you say it is "Enterprise" using software Raid? SATA & Enterprise in the same context is serious mistake. A single SATA can hang the entire SAS bus for 90 seconds causing major issues worse than a drive failure. Spending a few extra bucks on fat SAS drives is well worth it. Don't bother with SATA, they are a joke.

[Kevin OBrien]

chris.wilkes, on 17 December 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:

Seriously, Raid10 how, software Raid10? What software Raid. Can you say it is "Enterprise" using software Raid? SATA & Enterprise in the same context is serious mistake. A single SATA can hang the entire SAS bus for 90 seconds causing major issues worse than a drive failure. Spending a few extra bucks on fat SAS drives is well worth it. Don't bother with SATA, they are a joke.

Software RAID is used throughout many enterprise appliances and appliances (open up many NAS and SAN devices... quite a few run on software RAID), so it can't be discounted as easily as you might consider. In terms of nearline SATA, the SAS version of the Ultrastar wasn't available in a large sample size for us at the time we started building this review and the chassis specifically supports both SAS and SATA. Showing off both in use was the primary goal.

[chris.wilkes]

Thanks for the response, what software was utilized for Raid10? I will respectfully disagree that "Enterprise" NAS or SAN solutions use software raid. Can any examples be named? Some do, but they are highly proprietary and or hardware exclusive.

[mbreitba]

Software RAID - Lets see - Sun/Oracle/Nexenta ZFS based storage systems? Those are all software based, and most decidedly "enterprise" ready storage solutions.

Next question - Any reason to lean towards the iXsystems? Isn't this just a rebranded SuperMicro SBB?

[Brian]

mbreitba, on 19 December 2012 - 11:29 AM, said:

Software RAID - Lets see - Sun/Oracle/Nexenta ZFS based storage systems? Those are all software based, and most decidedly "enterprise" ready storage solutions.

Next question - Any reason to lean towards the iXsystems? Isn't this just a rebranded SuperMicro SBB?

It is an SMCI box. Working with iXsystems because they were more interested in engaging on this particular review than SMCI directly.

[dilidolo]

chris.wilkes, on 18 December 2012 - 05:15 PM, said:

Thanks for the response, what software was utilized for Raid10? I will respectfully disagree that "Enterprise" NAS or SAN solutions use software raid. Can any examples be named? Some do, but they are highly proprietary and or hardware exclusive.

NetApp uses RAID-DP but it is software based. Unless you think NetApp is not Enterprise.
ZFS uses Software based RAID.

[dilidolo]

I thought you were going to test ZFS but turned out to be the shelf which is a re-branded Supermicro. I would really love to see you test TrueNAS.

[Kevin OBrien]

dilidolo, on 19 December 2012 - 03:17 PM, said:

I thought you were going to test ZFS but turned out to be the shelf which is a re-branded Supermicro. I would really love to see you test TrueNAS.

The stepping stone was working with the shelf first to work into upcoming caching solution reviews, with the talks around TrueNAS already ongoing. We are hoping to have a system in soon to start testing in our test lab.

[chris.wilkes]

ZFS performance does not scale well with 16 spindles of fat SAS disks scrubbing and deslivering. NetApp on iXsystems, don't think so. Good luck keeping your data up time to 5 nines on any software based raid on commodity hardware. Seen too many people go down in flames trying.