Part of the reason for the PS3800XV's high performance is its SAS (serial attached SCSI) drives. My evaluation unit came with 16 147GB Maxtor 15K RPM SAS drives, providing a raw capacity of 2.3TB (usable capacity is 1.53TB with RAID50). The rest of the high performance comes from the enormous 2GB battery-backed cache integrated into each controller.

These batteries are designed to provide power to the cache for more than 72 hours with a full charge, so worries about lost writes are minimal. Also, with RAM caching of this size, it's nearly impossible to eclipse the cache space during normal operations. The end result is screaming throughput.

I ran a slew of performance tests on this array, including the aforementioned nbench tests. I also ran my not-really-patented four-day stress test, which involves creating a 1TB LUN (logical unit number), mounting that LUN on a Linux server and writing 1TB in 2GB files from /dev/zero, deleting all files, then starting again. Rinse and repeat for four days, and see what breaks. In this case, nothing broke, and the average write speed was 95MBps across all iterations, with total data transfers well over 10TB.

Everyone into the (storage) pool

Configuring the PS3800XV is a blindingly simple task. For the initial setup, EqualLogic ships a universal plug-and-play configuration client with the unit. When a bare unit is powered up, this utility finds it and runs the ground-up configuration, stepping the user through all necessary options. It's essentially the same as plugging into the serial console on one of the controllers and running through the initial configuration there, but without all the hassles of finding the right serial cable only to discover that your brand-new laptop doesn't have a serial port.