HP StorageWorks 2012i
Score: 4.1 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.

The HP StorageWorks 2012i is a 2U system with 12 drive bays that can house either SATA or SAS drives. Ours came half of each type of drives, an attractive feature for someone who wants a storage-area network but doesn't need or have the room for more than a dozen drives in total. In the rear of the box sit redundant hot-swappable controllers, and hot-swappable power supplies.

With a heritage in SAN technology that extends back over 20 years, HP has the most experience of any vendor in this space, and it shows in the StorageWorks 2012i. That much experience can come with an overwhelming pile of features, but HP does a good job of keeping feature overload in check and exposing the tools we needed to do our job within its well-designed management tools.

Management of the StorageWorks 2012i was simple and easy to understand. More importantly, the management system (you can use either a GUI or command-line interface or mix them up) showed a maturity that reduced our time to learn the product and get productive. For a system manager who is only part-time storage manager, that translates to increased productivity and fewer mistakes.

For an introductory-level product, HP has managed to cram a lot of enterprise functionality into a small box — and the ability to add two more disk shelves to expand capacity. While the feature set was very complete, performance of the StorageWorks 2012i was the main barrier keeping this system from being our midrange favorite. While management performance was pokey, the more critical issue was with storage performance: the StorageWorks 2012i was always near the bottom when using SATA drives, and half-way down the list when using SAS drives.

The StorageWorks 2012i is not perfect. We found minor annoyances, such as the lack of a SYSLOG facility and an inability to see which iSCSI initiators are connected. However, more critical features, such as built-in high availability and the multi-drive technology option, help to emphasize the fact that HP's StorageWorks 2012i is a powerful tool in a small package — at an outstanding entry-level price.