D-Link DSN-3200-10

D-Link DSN-3200-10
Score: 3.1 out of 5

Editor's note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, for a full rundown of how it fared in our testing across iSCSI SAN Server categories; please see our full coverage.

D-Link entered the SAN business, quietly, over a year ago and has been carving out a niche in the budget-minded space ever since. The DSN-3200-10 is a 3U chassis with 15 SATA drive bays. Behind the drive bays are a minimum of electronics, helping to give the DSN-3200-10 the highest efficiency rating of any device in our testing. The DSN-3200-10 is sold without hard drives. We filled ours with 15 1TB drives that we bought for $325 each. We added that cost to the base price of $7,600 of the DSN-3200-10 to make a more fair comparison.

We had more than our share of initial problems with this system. The firmware shipped with the system had to be upgraded just to work with the management system (running on our Windows 2003 server), and the first unit we tested crashed repeatedly until D-Link replaced it. 

All those problems might be considered normal and excusable if it weren't for the execrable technical support we received. When our unit first started crashing, we put in a service call. Every 12 to 24 hours for the next seven days, we called back, hoping to talk to a technician who could help us. Each time, D-Link told us that its technical support worked on a callback only system. We couldn't escalate our request, nor could we send in crash dumps so someone could call back prepared to solve our problem. We even tried calling the original manufacturer of the product (the DSN-3200-10 is an OEM product for D-Link licenses from iStor Networks), but they wouldn't return our call either. We ended up working directly with product management to get a replacement unit shipped out just to complete this test, real users would not likely be privvy to that option

Normally, a single bad experience with technical support is not worth mentioning, but being unable to get our problem solved after a week of waiting indicates that D-Link may want to sell high-end products, but has not adjusted its technical support to handle its needs. While our testing shows that the DSN-3200-10 meets basic SAN requirements s just fine, a business looking for maximum uptime should consider D-Link technical support a reason to limit the DSN-3200-10 to non-critical functions, such as backup-to-disk or data warehousing.

Ignoring bad support, the DSN-3200-10 is a great deal in a basic non-expandable iSCSI server. Some important high-end features, such as snapshots, thin provisioning, replication and the ability to add high-availability beyond the power supply level (the DSN-3200-10 comes with three hot-swappable N+1 power supplies) are missing, and the management system needs a great deal of work to make both problem resolution and configuration simpler. But if you don't need those features and want to start with a commercial product and minimum investment, the DSN-3200-10 fits the bill.