Open source enthusiasts, particularly Linux advocates, make much of the inherent systemic and cost efficiencies of Unix operating systems. To ascertain how the beauties of an open source operating system are brought to bear in departmental network-attached storage  appliances, we invited makers of these products into our labs.

Consistent with the notion that you get what you pay for, these products are less than stellar as a group, particularly with regard to management. Also, the best product was also far and away the most expensive. But from among the three vendors that submitted their products, Snap Appliance's Snap Server 14000 performed well enough across our criteria to win the Network World Blue Ribbon Award. The two other systems tested were StorTrends 2104 from American Megatrends (AMI) and FIA's  POPnetserver 4600. We evaluated the NAS appliances in four categories: ease of installation, hardware configuration/features, management and performance.

Snap Appliance

You can argue that Snap's strong showing reflects its considerable experience as a NAS appliance vendor. But the model we tested, the Linux-based Snap Server 14000, is considerably more expensive than its two competitors. A standard Snap Server 14000, with 1G byte of RAM and 12 120G-byte drives, costs $16,000. An AMI StorTrends 2104 with 512M bytes of RAM and no drives is priced at $2,300; and FIA's POPnetserver 4672 with 512M bytes of RAM and four 180G-byte drives is priced at $3,500.

Installation was easy thanks to an effective install wizard. Snap's Quick Install guide was the best we've seen - this installation wizard was the only one that prompted for a change of the default password. Our only complaint was the need for frequent reboots throughout the process.

Redundancy features abound, including RAID 5 with hot spare; hot swappable drives; and redundant power, fans, and Ethernet interfaces with load balancing capabilities. It also offers two integrated software features: ETrust Antivirus software from Computer Associates, and its own Integrated Backup Express, software that lets up to five Snap servers back up to a single tape device. When testing features, however, the process of administering snapshots was unnecessarily difficult, and the documentation failed to address our questions.