The POPnetserver 8000 comes with a three-year parts and labor warranty on a cross-shipment or carry-in basis. Although we find the price attractive, the lack of expandability and poor performance make us pass on this unit.
POPnetserver 8000, First Intelligent Array, (949) 940-6565, (888) 353-0337. www.fiainc.net
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.
The NetForce 1800 stumbled on its clunkily designed, Java-based management interface. Everything is nested in expandable menus and the whole thing is graceless, though it is usable and we had no problem playing with the device's features. The NetForce 1800 also comes with a journaling file system that recovers much more quickly than machines that use Microsoft's SAK in the face of a power-loss event.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
