NEWS BRIEFS
Phoenix, ARIZ. — Microtest, Inc., a leading developer of network-attached storage (NAS) operating systems and appliances, recently conducted performance tests on its NAS operating system. Two configurations, one using software RAID and the other hardware RAID, were tested using the industry standard NetBench 6.0 benchmark testing software to determine optimal throughput.
FileZerver’s OptiRAID system clocked a maximum throughput of 211 megabits per second with an average response time of 1.21 seconds. Surprisingly, the addition of a RAID controller to the test only resulted in a 1% improvement in throughput. The software RAID configuration included dual 733 MHz Pentium III processors, 128 MB of memory, three hard disk drives (54 gigabytes) configured in RAID 5 arrays, Extreme Networks Summit 24 switch and Intel’s PRO/1000 Gigabit Server Adapter. The hardware configuration hosted all of the above components along with the addition of an AMI hardware RAID controller.
“Our benchmark results far outperform any of the published numbers for midrange NAS products currently on the market, which culminate at 95 megabits per second for the next highest performing competitive product. When factoring in the overall price/performance of NAS solutions, FileZerver exceeds the competition even further,” indicated Mike Pfeffer, Director of Engineering, Microtest Network Appliances and Storage. “The test results comparing our OptiRAID, Microtest’s unique software RAID system, to dedicated hardware RAID implementations confirm our leadership in optimized RAID solutions and matches the available performance numbers for enterprise storage systems.”
Microtest’s FileZerver controller and NAS operating system including OptiRAID provide the heart for a growing number of integrator, VAR and OEM storage appliances. In addition, the FileZerver operating system is being marketed to OEM vendors implementing a variety of Intel-based architecture servers.
Full disclosure on benchmark tests will be made available in the near future via the Microtest NAS website: http://nas.microtest.com .
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