Boston Igloo 64 T-Stor review

Coming in as the successor to WSS2003 R2, the new WSS2008 offers a modest range of new features. Along with support for SMB and NFS file sharing, you get Microsoft's iSCSI target included as standard and this has been beefed up to 64-bit only and now supports LUNs up to 16TB.

The Igloo is preinstalled with WSS2008 Enterprise which essentially has the same support for memory, RAID, and storage capacity as Server 2008 Enterprise. The primary method of management is via RDP and you'll find all storage features are accessed directly from the Server Manager interface.

This provides provisioning wizards for setting up volumes and shared storage and guides you through creating shared folders and assigning access permissions. Microsoft's generosity extends to including all the file screening, quota and storage report features as standard. These allow you to decide what files may be copied to the appliance, limit the amount of space users can consume and raise detailed reports on storage usage.

For iSCSI target creation you select a volume, decide on a target name and assign logged in initiators to it. Next, you create virtual drives within the target and these need an absolute path name for the VHD file and a size. We had no problems creating targets and were able to decide which initiators were allowed access.