Infortrend EonStor GS 3016R3 Review

The Infortrend EonStor GS 3016R3 (SHOP HERE) is a unified storage solution featuring a short chassis depth. This platform supports up to 16x 3.5-inch SAS SSDs in 3U. Apparently, there is also an EonStor GS 3016S3 platform but that one offers a single controller not the dual controllers offered on the 3016R3. The “R” indicates dual redundant controllers and those with an “S”, have a single controller. To be fair, you can upgrade the 3016S3 to dual controllers quite easily. This system integrates Network Attached Storage or NAS, Storage Area Network or SAN, and Cloud Gateway. That basically means it bridges the gap between remote cloud-based applications and applications that are based locally. Licensing options apply. This platform will provide for file storage, block storage, and object storage.

This system came very well packaged and secure with drives and chassis in custom laser-cut foam padding. The drives were already in their trays and ready to be installed in the chassis. The system also came with rack rails to install into the enclosure. Best if you install the chassis into the enclosure before installing the drives.

On the front of the 3U platform, there are 16x 3.5-inch drive bays, and a small control panel on the left server ear.

It has a few tell-tale lights for Service, in the event there is a problem. That service icon kind of looks like the dashboard light in our cars. Next a Power Supply Status, Cooling Module Status, AKA fans, Temperature Status, System Fault, and Mute Button/Service LED.

There is a fairly stylish front bezel that can be added to the mix but that is optional. The drive trays also have LEDs indicating the power status and whether it is currently busy.

Not surprising, the Infortrend EonStor GS 3016R3 can be expanded using Infortrend’s other storage enclosures offering 40, 60, and 90-bay options in 4U.

It can scale to up to 448 drives with just a bunch of disks connecting with an onboard SAS expansion port or together with a scale-out expansion board, or Host Board, you can add an additional 448 drives for up to 896 drives. With just the single controller, this would be limited to that 448-drive threshold. With the dual redundant controllers, additional Expansion boards effectively double the expansion enclosure capacity. Drives supported on this system are all SAS with 12Gb/s access speeds from a variety of MFRGs and include SAS SSDs and HDDs.

The back of the system is very basic with dual redundant 530W 80 PLUS Bronze or GOLD power supply units to either side and dual control modules between. Each control module has an RJ45 port for network communications, plus 2x 12Gb/s expansion ports, 2x 25GbE SFP28 ports, and 2x host board slots, per controller module.

You have options for the host boards, which just pop into place with 2x Host Boards supported per controller and offer a variety of additional network connections for connecting additional appliances. All told, with the default ports on the controllers, plus 2x additional Host Boards per controller, there can be up to 28 ports in the redundant model.

That small LED panel in the lower right of each Controller Module has 4x warning lights for Control Status), CBM Status, C_D Status, and HST Busy Status. These LEDs are either green, or emit no light, when operating within parameters. If they are Amber, there is a problem. The first one Ctrl Status indicates a general problem with the controller. CBM indicates whether the Cache Backup Module is ready, green for good, amber for failure or missing. If it’s blinking the supercapacitor is charging. C_D Status, also indicates Cache status and is usually not on at all. If an amber light is showing, it indicates the cache memory is dirty, data is being flushed to cache, or other potential errors. If it’s blinking this indicates cache data is being transferred to the M.2 flash module in the controller. After transfer the LED will turn off. That last one, HOST Busy is just that, it indicates traffic between the storage enclosure and a host system on the host bus. The other holes adjacent with Default label is a reset button and LED light for reset.

For any type of expansion enclosure, connections are daisy-chained through the 12Gb/s SAS connector from the primary controller to an expansion port. There are a few different ways to configure the daisy chains. Each of the controllers supports a single Intel Xeon D CPU with 4x cores. This unit features 12Gb/s throughput with a SAS connection. The control unit comes with up to 128GB of either ECC UDIMMs or standard DIMM modules per controller. In the event there is a power failure, each module also has a supercapacitor and flash module with up to 256GB of cache to help store any data floating around in the Ether.

EonStor uses the EonOne, a web-based management interface, which is fairly intuitive. You can easily manage clusters and multiple appliances. You can also set up Administrators, have it send notifications, manage your storage assets, reassign pools of storage, and create different RAID levels depending on your needs. Here is a quick run through of some of the screens you will encounter.

Once we log on, you can see a basic Overview section, or dashboard, that gives a general overview of system parameters for connected devices. The Device List is where you would see a list of attached enclosures, each of which you can select for more information. As we never connected it to anything else, you just see that lonely GS3016R3. Next, Resource Usage by controller. Capacity of storage, a Summary section, and Event Log for error messages. The capacity window shows how many Terabytes of storage. Given the drives were 14TB, two of which were not integrated into a RAID, we have roughly 224TB of storage that is shared between the two data pools. That would be the approximate capacity as some of that is allocated to system support and RAID depending on how the system is configured. We end up with 87.3TB of free storage for each of two storage pools.

Clicking the Setting link on the Device Information tab provides a bit more information Including an Initial Setup Wizard to help you get started configuring the system. Settings including General System Information, Time, Notifications, Service Manager Settings, License Management, System Information, which as you can see here, we just set this system up at the time we did the video capture. Another Tab for Self-Encrypting Device management. Power Management tab for uninterruptible Power Supply, or UPS, power units that might be attached for failsafe. An Enclosure View with a visual of the front and rear of the chassis. You can click on the various elements for more information.

The Maintenance tab allows you to export the system configuration, assuming you plan on installing it on the same chassis. Another Infortrend EonStor GS 3016R3.

The Storage Tab provides information on the front drive capacity and status, among other things. You can also click on the individual drives for more information. Here is where you would also create an SSD Cache. We may look at the user interface a little more in depth at a later date as we never did get to fully integrate the system with other enclosures or host systems. Time management issues… Happens sometimes.

For a capable storage enclosure with a lot of potential and the ability to quickly add additional enclosures to support more capacity, the Infortrend EonStor GS 3016R3 storage enclosure is a worthy candidate. You can attach several different platforms offering 40, 60, or up to 90 drives in a 4U chassis, supporting both cloud and local storage. Our support staff also found the Management interface to be fairly simple and easy to use. All Good! If you are looking for a storage appliance, check out our website here.