IT Pro Verdict

The U400HA-D424 ticks all the right boxes for high availability storage. Along with fast controller failover and a high capacity, it offers an excellent range of features at a price the blue chips won’t be able to match

Reasons to buy

+
Excellent value; Dual active/active controllers; Very fast failover; NAS and IP SAN support; Good performance

Reasons to avoid

-
Some software features yet to be implemented; SATA drives require extra MUX boards

By Dave Mitchell

Published 8 May 2015 In Reviews

Qsan's TrioNAS LX U400HA-D424 has every storage angle covered as it combines NAS, IP SAN and backup services with top-notch reliability. The appliance has redundancy as a high priority with no single point of failure throughput its entire architecture.

Its dual controllers operate in full active/active mode where they perform cache mirroring over a high-speed 64Gbps backplane and in the event of a controller failure, Qsan claims the appliance can failover in less than 60 seconds. Further hardware protection is provided by three redundant 550W PSUs and dual hot-swap cooling fan modules.

With ZFS in the driving seat, you get a fine choice of storage features including scheduled snapshots, data deduplication, compression and thin provisioning. You can use SSDs as read or write caches to boost performance plus local and remote replication are included in the price.

The new web management interface is much better designed than the previous version