FalconStor Software's NSS-S12
Score: 3.7 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.

The FalconStor NSS-S12 is a packaged offering based on FalconStor's own SAN Disk Manager, a combination of operating system and storage-area network management toolkit. As a software company first, and a hardware company second, FalconStor has pulled together the hardware in the NSS-S12 to offer a unified solution for enterprises that don't want to roll their own hardware.

The NSS-S12 hardware is a 2U PC with 12 1,000GB SATA drives (a SAS version of the product is also available). The NSS-S12 also is not expandable and cannot implement a controller high-availability configuration; again, a different version of the product is used should you require those provisions.

FalconStor's software is definitely the jewel of the product, including unparalleled high level of support for snapshot operations, multi-site replication with bandwidth management and automatic scheduled reporting. The GUI and command-line interface were both fairly easy to use when it came to iSCSI configuration and operations.

Where things broke down was in operating system integration. FalconStor definitely made an effort to "appliancize" its software on the NSS-S12 platform, but the company didn't do that good of a job. For example, when we made a slight misstep in the Ethernet bonding configuration, it took several hours of technical support to get it fixed, including a remote access session by one of FalconStor's network gurus. A similar integration problem lies in the Acera RAID controller, a built-in part of the NSS-S12 product, which is not connected to or controlled by the FalconStor GUI.

Overall performance is about average for SATA-based servers.

The main draw of the FalconStor product is the replication agents. If you want your SAN to be a primary part of a backup and recovery strategy, FalconStor offers wider application support in its replication tools than anyone else. FalconStor charges a relatively high premium for this support — the NSS-S12 had the highest cost per gigabyte of storage of any SATA-based server tested — but if you believe the most important part of an iSCSI server is the software, FalconStor may be worth the premium.