My point yesterday was that we should take test numbers with a grain of salt. But I added some test info, which brought me a few questions about performance. It seems that there must be a fair number of people actually looking at the FAS270. Is it right for you?

Let’s compare the F840, the F940, and the FAS270.

840 does about 11000 ops/sec
940 does about 17000 ops/sec
270 does about 07000 ops/sec
(Clustered filers yield more, but it’s short of 2.x)

Another big thing to look at is capacity, network and redundancy.

The 840 will support 6TB RAW, 12 TB in a cluster.
The 940 will support 12TB RAW, 24 TB in a cluster.
The 270 will support 6TB RAW, A clustered 270 still only supports 6TB RAW

The 840 and 940 can have multiple NICs, HBAs, SCSI, FCP cards added to them. As a network filer you could configure these boxes with redundant HBAs, create ether channel with 4 GigE ports for more throughput and redundancy, connect to redundant switches, etc.

The 270 has 2 GigE ports, one fiber channel for connecting an additional shelf, and one fiber channel that functions as an initiator for tape drives.

Is the 270 good for you? You need to answer these questions first:
What is the application?
What is the expected growth?
What are the uptime requirements?
What are the performance requirements?
How much space do you have?

The 270 is a nice compact machine for the small office or home office, but it is not really for enterprise class, business critical applications.

A nice used, inexpensive 840 (With or with out a transferable license) is probably the best choice unless you need the power and scalability of a 940.

If you really want a bargain and space is not critical, you can get a used 760. (I didn’t mention them since it is almost impossible to get one with a transferable license these days.) You can get a good-used 760 for a great price and Zerowait will even provide hardware support to keep things running smoothly.

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