Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Discuss this article Flame the author     In this article Introduction Dell PowerVault 775N Excel Meridian Data NetStor MVD Hewlett-Packard HP StorageWorks NAS B3000 First Intelligent Array POPnetserver 8000 Procom Technology NetForce 1800 Executive Summary | Web Links How We Tested Report Card

The Procom NetForce 1800 was one of two units configured as a single device with internal disks, rather than a system with separate head and storage components. The NetForce 1800 is a solid performer on the NFS side of things, but all in all it's an average machine with a hefty price.

The Procom NetForce 1800 is a 2U unit with a 3.06-GHz Intel Xeon processor and 4 GB of RAM. Network connectivity is provided by two 10/100/1000 copper Gigabit Ethernet ports; the device we received also had a fiber gigabit NIC. Dual-input power leads to two hot-swappable power supplies, accessible from the rear of the machine. The unit supports a local tape drive or external storage, to bring its total possible capacity up to 6 TB. On the front of the machine, a neat little LCD displays CPU utilization and lets you configure the network without having to console into the unit or let it use DHCP. The NetForce 1800 has plenty of internal bandwidth, thanks to an Intel motherboard and 64-bit/66-MHz slots to sustain high transfer rates. You can also bond like NIC ports together for load-balancing/failover configurations.

In our tests, the NetForce 1800 did particularly well at the NFS tests, winning all the linear read, IOps and NWC Custom tests. On the CIFS side, the NetForce 1800 performed well, frequently finishing second or third. We found the CPU utilization on the machine's front handy for indicating when the CPU had maxed out. The Excel Meridian unit and the FIA unit did not have any way--short of going to a Unix console with special access--to see what their CPUs were doing, and the Windows-powered HP and Dell units simply used Perfmon. CPU monitoring on NAS devices is generally lacking, but the Procom unit shined there.