Reldata 9240 Unified Storage Gateway
Score: 3.6 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 Reldata 9240 Unified Storage Gateway we tested came as two separate boxes: one, a 2U controller made by Reldata, and the second, a 2U LSI Logic Engenio disk array with 12 300GB 15K SAS drives. Reldata also offers lower speed SAS and SATA options, all of which are expandable by adding disk shelves. The controller we tested doesn't include built-in high availability. But the Reldata 9240 Unified Storage Gateway also includes NAS capabilities, which we did not test.

Our first impression of the Unified Storage Gateway was that it wasn't very unified. The disk array is managed separately from the iSCSI controller, which caused us a lot of initial confusion — because our disk array was shipped completely unconfigured. That lack of integration adds to overall management complexity.

Complexity is a term that kept showing up in our notes on the Reldata 9240. In addition to architectural complexity, the management system is exceedingly complex and would be unusable if it weren't for the wizards that help to stitch together different pieces of the product into a coherent whole. Interestingly, even though we found the GUI to be quite complicated, there is an "advanced mode" that we didn't even break into, for fear that the options would be too overwhelming.

Reldata makes up for the complexity and lack of documentation (no manual was available for the version we tested, so we used a manual for an older version) by providing very high-quality technical support with the product. With Reldata, we connected with very experienced engineers every time we called with a problem. In fact, Reldata even went beyond the call by helping us with problems that weren't even related to their hardware. The technical support is critical: because the GUI is so slow to respond and lags behind what is actually happening, a new user can quickly become confused about whether a configuration change has occurred or gotten lost. Without some hand-holding from Reldata, we never would have made this work.

As an iSCSI SAN server, the Reldata Unified Storage Gateway certainly met basic requirements. We had no interoperability problems, good success using snapshots, and found a strong replication feature set. The Unified Storage Gateway came in with average performance numbers, below our top SAS-based products and solidly in the middle of the pack. So with a fairly high price per gigabyte rating ($12.20), and very middle-of-the-road performance, it's hard to see a compelling case for choosing Reldata when its best feature seems to be the technical team standing behind it.