IT Pro Verdict

SMBs won’t go far wrong with Gateway’s GS2040 as this appliance is built on a firm foundation, has a good range of network storage features, a high expansion potential and hardware redundancy too. It's also very easy to install and manage. However, we recommend checking out HP’s StorageWorks P2000 G3 arrays first as they cost around the same, are 10-Gigabit ready and provide many backup features as standard rather than as options.

By Dave Mitchell

Published 6 July 2011 In Reviews

A quick start wizard steps through configuring the four iSCSI data ports and choosing spare drives to cover any failures.

Your next task is to create RAID groups where you choose your drives and decide on an array type which can range from a simple mirror to dual drive redundant RAID 6. The process is very simple as you choose either SAS or SATA drive types, pick an array and decide how many drives are to be used in it.

Target creation is a swift process as you create a logical unit, decide on its size in MB, GB, TB or blocks and choose a LUN (logical unit number). You can assign it to a specific data port and either use an existing iSCSI target or create a new one. Access security is good as it can be enabled on individual data ports to stop more than one host logging in to an iSCSI target and you can implement CHAP authentication as well.

The GS2040 returned some good results in our performance tests. Starting with a Dell PowerEdge R515 running Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit, we saw the Iometer utility report high raw read and write throughputs of 110MB/s and 100MB/s.