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| By Chris Angelini | ||||
I REALLY ENJOY HAVING AN OFFICE with plenty of room for technology. My desk sports four LCDs, all of which are put to use when I’m elbow-deep in research or laying out the latest RAM email newsletter. A large bench behind me easily supports three open-air rigs for putting the latest hardware through its paces. A 24U rackmount enclosure in an adjacent room holds the larger enterprise equipment that comes in for testing. Between the desk, the test bench, and that rack, I have most everything I could possibly want for researching and writing about the latest and greatest from the companies that matter to resellers. What I’m missing, though, is that in-depth look at the interactions between VARs and their vendor partners, especially when it comes to highly-configurable solutions, such as storage servers. We can talk all we want about how many drive bays a box has, which motherboards it’ll take, and how easy it is to expand out to external JBODs, but without the proper support, it’s surprisingly easy for a reseller to get stuck spinning his wheels if a controller card doesn’t match up to a backplane or the system ships without the right cables. Earlier this month, I set aside the Rockstar energy drinks and late-night word-a-thons to take a road trip. I visited City of Industry and Ontario, both in southern California, to see Terabyte Server Storage Tech (TST), Advanced Industrial Computer (AIC), and Chenbro—-all prolific players in the chassis space with unique approaches to building and selling storage servers. TST—TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS My first stop was TST, the smallest of the three vendors. But whatever the company lacked in manpower, it made up for in attention to detail. My host, Kenneth Chung, VP of sales, was on the phone when I pulled up, so I had an opportunity to browse around TST’s own warehouse for a minute as he finished up. Neat stacks of brown, enclosure-sized boxes were piled up all over, some opened and others sealed shut. In another part of the facility, power supplies were similarly organized. Backplanes, midplanes, cables, and connectors were all clearly visible, right where TST’s techs could pick them up and drop them into an order in progress. Chung joined me after a couple of minutes and began showing me around. There were many systems in various stages of completion on the production floor, so I had the opportunity to go hands-on with several configurations. One of the boxes, an ESR-210, had its top off and internals exposed. I was shown how TST’s backplanes are mounted horizontally, whereas competing platforms leverage vertical mounts. The difference is in airflow. More room for air to pass across installed hard drives and through to the chassis means better cooling, fans that spin slower, and less noise overall. There was also significantly more room to work in the chassis, even with the storage midplane attached. If you’ve ever worked on the inside of a storage server, you probably know what “two fingering” it means. TST’s ESR-210 has enough room for a whole hand, making it that much easier to hook storage controllers to midplanes without scraping your knuckles on treacherous pins or mounting brackets. In fact, Chung demonstrated how easy it was to field-service the entire midplane/backplane assembly with nothing more than a screwdriver. I’m a real neat-freak, so it really struck a chord to see all of the enclosure’s steel surfaces covered in Mylar film. When the reseller receives a TST enclosure, he can install a motherboard, processor, and drives without worrying about leaving scratches or fingerprints on the hardware. When the enclosure is deployed, he can tear off the protective sheeting to reveal a pristine new server. I’ve never been a fan of rail kits, either. They’re usually undocumented, sold as an add-on, and difficult to mount. TST’s rails are actually built into the chassis and included as part of the purchase. You attach one component to the rack and slide the box right in. According to Ken, the slim rails can hold 500 pounds each, which is plenty even for the company’s larger enclosures. What impressed me most about TST—-and the reason TST claims to be picking up a lot of its competitors’ customers-—is the service that goes with your chassis of choice. Take a look at any enclosure on the company’s Web site (www.tstcom.com), such as the ESR-420. On the specifi cation list, you see that the box comes with a 950W 2+1 hot-swap redundant configuration. If you’d rather have a 1,350W redundant setup, TST can make that happen. Then choose between four different storage backplanes: SATA point-to-point, SATA multi-lane, Ultra 320 SCSI, or SAS. “We work with the customer directly in order to figure out what they need the system to do,” says TST’s Chung. “If they’re installing an LSI controller and a SAS backplane, I make sure they have the cables needed to make the right connection.” A handful of other little touches solidify the value in TST’s solutions. Modified power supply cables, for instance, guarantee you have enough slack to reach the right connector but not enough to cause cable clutter inside the chassis. A custom case management circuit, compliments of an electrical engineer at TST, makes sure you receive standard front-panel LED warnings, plus an audible alarm if a power supply or disk drive fails. Rolled edges reduce the risk of injury from the all-steel chassis. Such a flexible range of designs ensures you’ll always have a go-to in the company’s lineup. As I was leaving TST, I stopped by the company’s lab, which looked a lot like the bench in my own office. On the test bed were some of the company’s new blade enclosures, which represent a new market for TST. The current model takes Intel’s S3000PT server board, includes a 275W fixed power supply and front I/O, and sports a point-to-point SATA backplane. Writing about blades is one thing, but actually picking a tiny chassis up, looking at its quad-core processor, gigs of memory, and dual 2.5” drives and realizing how much computing power fits inside the 7”-wide little enclosures is fairly amazing. A single 4U B410PT chassis takes up to 10 of the compact nodes. That’s up to 40 execution cores in 7” of vertical rack space. AIC COVERS THE SPECTRUM My next stop was AIC, where marketing manager Alvin Ooi met me at the door and showed me to the company’s demo room. Here several racks were set up with a few of AIC’s products. I say “a few” because once Alvin gave me a copy of AIC’s product reference guide, I realized just how many unique products it offered. From appliances to rackmount chassis to blades, drive canisters, JBODs, and storage servers, AIC has its hands in just about everything. The company’s most well known products are probably AIC’s Xtore solutions, which range from complete, network-attached Windows Storage Server systems to direct-attached JBODs. I found that the empty JBOD and RAID systems were most attractive because they give resellers the most opportunity to differentiate through today’s processor and memory technology versus the WSS boxes already configured with older Pentium 4 setups. In looking at AIC’s lineup, I noticed that several of the chassis sported unique designs. I asked Ooi about the paint schemes, and he mentioned that soft tooling was one of the services AIC offered to its customers. The minimum order size for such a feature was small, he said, though he didn’t give specifics. Nevertheless, I was impressed by how much better a chassis looked after being painted to match a given reseller’s own design, especially after looking at one dark chassis after another. Ooi and I also spent some time talking about compatibility, which I know is a big issue from talking to both VARs and storage vendors. Imagine buying a chassis from a company such as AIC, complete with its own SAS midplane. The backplane comes with it and is driven by a SAS expander chip from LSI, as an example. Then you drop in a motherboard, processor, memory, and storage controller card in the vein of 3ware or Adaptec that gets the platform talking to the installed drives. Provided that all of the connections go smoothly, you have a 3ware controller connected to an LSI expander plugged in to AIC’s midplane, ending with an array of SAS and SATA disk drives from another third-party vendor. Ideally, the controller card’s bundled software will navigate its way through that labyrinth of proprietary hardware. Yet I’ve heard plenty of examples in which the controller couldn’t see any attached drives or it would only see some of them. According to Ooi, the solution is often as simple as a firmware update from the controller vendor or the expander manufacturer. Sometimes the solution requires a hardware respin. The point of our discussion was that AIC maintains relationships with Fujitsu, Seagate, Hitachi GST, Adaptec, LSI Logic, and Vitesse so that it can guarantee compatibility between their products and its own. In fact, AIC sponsors a Web page at xtore.com/sascompatible where you can go for reference material on mixing and matching hardware with the company’s storage enclosures. Whereas TST has its foundation solidly in the storage server market (and a remarkable support infrastructure in place to guide the customers buying those enclosures), AIC’s product portfolio is much broader. If you’re looking to do something with security appliances, pedestal-type enclosures, or massive 8U storage boxes, AIC is able to handle those applications. CHENBRO IS EVERYWHERE My last stop of the day was Chenbro, likely one of the first names you think of when it comes to desktop and server enclosures. I was met by Wroe Cheng, director of operations and product management for Chenbro, and account manager Rick Cheng. We sat down in the company’s conference room, which was surrounded by a host of enclosure products. Again, what I saw was only a sample of Chenbro’s portfolio, which spanned several catalogs worth of PC chassis, pedestal workstation boxes, and rackmount server enclosures. The nice thing about Chenbro’s product matrix is that it’s broken down into usage. It’s easy to tell which box would work best as a Web server, as a load balancer, as a VPN, as an application server, and so on. After looking at rackmount boxes all day long, it was refreshing to see some innovation in Chenbro’s pedestal lineup, which is still a viable market for customers with a limited number of servers or in need of a graphics workstation. Most of the boxes I was shown were optimized for multi-processor configurations, 120mm cooling fans, hot-swappable disk drives, and, in many cases, redundant power supplies-—everything you could want from a rackmount case in an attractive floor standing unit. Like AIC, Chenbro’s rackmounted lineup is also extremely diverse, so there’s plenty of selection when it comes time to choose the right box. Although my primary interest in visiting the three enclosure vendors was learning more about how each worked with resellers to enable solid whitebox servers and workstations, Chenbro had a little something special to show me based on talks with Microsoft about Windows Home Server. The company’s own Home Server chassis is already shipping in volume and is incredibly cool looking. It can hold a miniITX motherboard, four hot-swappable hard drives, and a single 2.5” drive for operating system files. My first concern about such a dense system was noise and cooling, but Chang was adamant that a fully populated ES34069 wouldn’t make any more noise than other home theater-based appliances. Already excited about rolling out Home Server in my own house, seeing Chenbro’s solution and the serious hardware push behind the operating system made me wonder how well the channel will do with it. BACK TO REALITY Of the people I was able to meet and things I was able to see, the strongest message I came away with was from TST. Storage servers are easy to build, they’re easy to configure, and there are companies out there ready to help resellers without experience in a rackmount environment get their feet wet. Before the company’s products even leave the warehouse, they’re configured with the backplane, midplane, power supplies, and cables needed to get the job done. You simply add a configured platform and storage, hook everything up, and take care of the installed software. Take it from this lab rat. If you aren’t in the business of storage today, you’re going to wish you were tomorrow. |
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