Advatronix Nimbus 400 File Server Review

Introduction and Testing Methodology

The increasing role of computers and electronic communication has resulted in the need to manage large amounts of data. This need has been felt across a wide spectrum of consumers ranging from home users to big enterprises. In the home / small business space, one option is to use network attached storage units that are ready to use out of the box. Sometimes, it is also necessary to have a server with added flexibility to store the data. This is where storage servers based on Windows or Linux distros come into play. These servers can either be bought as an appliance or assembled in a DIY fashion. Today, we will be looking at a system based on the former approach - the Advatronix Nimbus 400.

Advatronix is a US-based vendor of computing server solutions. We reviewed their Intel Xeon-based Cirrus 1200 solution last year. The Nimbus 400 is a server solution targeting a completely different market segment. Based on the Intel Avoton (Atom) platform, the lineup's members targets scenarios where the primary need is to act as a file server and the general computing workload is not expected to be taxing. That said, the Nimbus 400 ticks the feature checkboxes that consumers usually expect from enterprise-level file server platforms:

• ECC RAM
• IPMI 2.0 with iKVM for headless operation and full management control over the network
• TPM (Trusted Platform Module) provision

The Nimbus 400 provides plenty of customization options.

• Choice of OS: Diskless w/o OS, CentOS 7.1, FreeNAS, Windows Home Server 2011, Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials and Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard
• SoC: Intel Atom C2550 (4C/4T @ 14W TDP) or Intel Atom C2750 (8C/8T @ 20W TDP)
• DRAM: 2GB to 64GB of DDR3 ECC RAM @ 1600 MHz
• PSU: 250W or 660W Modular Gold Rated
• Fixed / OS Drives: 1x or 2x RAID-1 160GB SSD
• Data Drives: 1x - 4x 3.5" NAS Drives (2, 3 or 4TB) or 4x 3.5" Enterprise Drives (2 or 4TB)

The table below compares our review configuration against other systems that have been evaluated by us using the same methodology (and hence, serve as comparison points).

Evaluation Methodology

A file server can be used for multiple purposes, unlike a dedicated NAS. Evaluating a file server with our standard NAS testing methodology wouldn't do justice to the eventual use-cases and would tell only a part of the story to the reader. Hence, we adopt a hybrid approach in which the evaluation is divided into two parts - one, as a standalone computing system and another as a storage device on a network.

In order to get an idea of the performance of the file server as a standalone computing system, we boot up the unit with a USB key containing a Ubuntu-on-the-go installation. The drives in the bays are configured in a mdadm RAID-5 array. Selected benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite (i.e, those benchmarks relevant to the usage of a system as a file server) are processed after ensuring that any test utilizing local storage (disk benchmarks, in particular) point to the mdadm RAID-5 array. Usage of the Phoronix Test Suite allows readers to have comparison points for the file server against multiple systems (even those that haven't been benchmarked by us).

As a storage device on a network, there are multiple ways to determine the performance. One option would be to repeat all our NAS benchmarks on the system, but that would be take too much time to process for a given system that we are already testing as a standalone computer. On the other hand, it is also important to look beyond numbers from artificial benchmarks and see how a system performs in terms of business metrics. <a href="https://www.spec.org/sfs2014/>SPEC SFS 2014 comes to our help here. The benchmark tool is best used for evaluation of SANs. However, it also helps us here to see the effectiveness of the file server as a storage node in a network. The SPEC SFS 2014 has been developed by the IOZone folks, and covers evaluation of the filer in specific application scenarios like the number of virtual machines that can be run off the filer, number of simultaneous databases, number of video streams that can be simultaneously recorded and the number of simultaneous software builds that can be processed.

Our SPEC SFS 2014 setup consists of a SMB share on the file server under test connected over an Ethernet network to our NAS evaluation testbed outlined below. Further details about the SPEC SFS 2014 workloads will be provided in the appropriate section.

The above testbed runs 10 Windows 7 VMs simultaneously, each with a dedicated 1 Gbps network interface. This simulates a real-life workload of up to 10 clients for the NAS being evaluated. All the VMs connect to the network switch to which the NAS is also connected (with link aggregation, as applicable). The VMs generate the NAS traffic for performance evaluation.

Thank You!

We thank the following companies for helping us out with our NAS testbed:

• Thanks to Intel for the Xeon E5-2630L CPUs and the ESA I-340 quad port network adapters
• Thanks to Asus for the Z9PE-D8 WS dual LGA 2011 workstation motherboard
• Thanks to Dynatron for the R17 coolers
• Thanks to G.Skill for the RipjawsZ 64GB DDR3 DRAM kit
• Thanks to OCZ Technology for the two 128GB Vertex 4 SSDs, twelve 64GB Vertex 4 SSDs and the OCZ Z-Drive R4 CM88
• Thanks to SilverStone for the Raven RV03 chassis and the 850W Strider Gold Evolution PSU
• Thanks to Netgear for the ProSafe GSM7352S-200 L3 48-port Gigabit Switch with 10 GbE capabilities.