We got our hands on one of Thecus' eight-bay N8800PRO storage appliances for the purpose of taking Open-E's Data Storage Software V6 out for a test drive. Read on as we set up, manage, and benchmark this marriage of storage-oriented hardware and software.
Small and medium businesses, government offices, health care providers, and research institutions generate lots of data every single day. All of that information needs to be archived and protected. As a case in point, the German Electron Synchrotron, DESY, in Hamburg, generates 100 TB of raw data per experiment, and a typical health care provider can generates hundreds of gigabytes per month in patient records.
Beyond simply storing data, managing it cost-effectively is critical, as is delivering the information to users and applications where and when they need it. Business-class storage devices are designed to do that over a number of different interfaces. Direct-attached and network-attached are two of the most popular, though storage area networks built on Fibre Channel or iSCSI technology are popular as well.
Even as enterprise-grade technology increasingly finds its way into SMB environments, NAS remains a moderate-performance, affordable technology for small- and medium-sized businesses. Flexible protocol support and provisions for backup technologies like data replication and synchronization are particularly attractive.

There are plenty of network-attached appliances available. However, the selection thins out considerably you filter by reliability, performance, enterprise support, and reasonable cost. Thecus sent over its N8800PRO to demonstrate that a storage server with redundant power supplies, a multi-core host processor, and performance-oriented networking can be had for about $1600 without hard drives. Add eight of your own 2 TB nearline SATA disks and the unit's cost hovers around $3600.
But an accessible price tag isn't the only interesting aspect of this NAS device. You can also install Open-E's Data Storage Software V6 on it, which expands its feature set beyond what Thecus' own firmware offers. Some of Open-E DSS 6.0's capabilities include iSCSI, CIFS, and Fibre Channel support. Installing the third-party firmware is relatively easy from a flash drive or CD. As the installation process progresses, device drives (needed for the storage and Ethernet controllers) are automatically configured.
In the pages that follow, we'll discuss how Open-E DSS 6.0 and Thecus' N8800OPRO interact, with an emphasis on the third-party operating environment. There are integrators who offer package deals, pre-installing Open-E DSS 6.0 on the Thecus appliance. The cost of that combination often depends on the features you enable and the storage array installed.
- Thecus And Open-E: Enterprise-Class Storage For SMBs?
- Thecus' N8800PRO Eight-Bay Storage Server
- Thecus N8800PRO: Peeking Inside
- Thecus' N8800PRO With Open-E DDS 6.0
- Open-E: Configuring A RAID Array
- Open-E: Creating A Volume Group
- Open-E: Creating Users And Network Shares
- Open-E: Admin Settings, iSCSI, And Fail-Over
- Open-E: System And Hardware Status
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Multimedia
- Benchmark Results: Office
- Open-E Makes Creating Storage Servers Easier
For the hardware price, I'd go for a Dell R510. it's about the same price. Then I'd run CentOS 5 or 6 on it. CentOS can do most of what this thing can do with no cost. Or the business could opt for Win 2k8 r2 for $600 more or MS SBS for $800 more and get an easier to manage system that any yahoo proclaiming to be an admin could fix.
IOP performance is garbage on SATA drives, and I've seen FreeNAS do a better job than what was portrayed in this article.
As far as the performance, I'd say it was right in line with low end devices using iSCSI.
Any iSCSI devices you can pretty much count the 1GB ethernet link as the bottle neck, which puts it around 100 - 125 max. 2x Multi pathing may bring that up to around 190, but good luck achieving usable transfer rates of 250+ as peter claims.
For the money i'd choose dgingeri's dell in a heart beat.
Al changes , done to the storage , were done in some xml files of the application
Needles to say that whenever you did anything in command line , the web apllication would not recognize the result
That said, keep up the good work in your core space Tom's!