Review: StarWind Enterprise Server – Part II

This is the second of a series of posts reviewing the StarWind Enterprise Server iSCSI software target.  The posts relate to version 4 of the product.  Previous post(s) can be found at:

Review: StarWind Enterprise Server – Part I

In the first post of this review, I explained how StarWind’s server product provided the ability to turn a Windows server into an iSCSI storage device.  In this post, I’ll focus more on the specific LUN types available to the user.

There’s not doubt the range of supported devices is comprehensive, although some features such as encryption and compression need more explanation to understand how they are implemented and how data could be recovered in a server failure scenario.

Thin Provisioning

It’s pretty much taken for granted that thin provisioning needs to be provided as a feature in storage arrays, whether physical or virtual.  Fortunately StarWind Server offers this as part of the CDP device type.  As a test, I created an iSCSI thin LUN using the console and connected it to a Windows host.  As expected, copying files to the LUN grew the device by the size of the copied files.  Unfortunately, deleting the files and/or reformatting the drive did not reclaim the released space.  In fact, a full format of the drive, rather than a quick format resulted in the full capacity of the drive being allocated and the benefits of thin provisioning wasted. (Tip: Use Quick format on Windows).  In this release of the product there appears to be no way to reclaim unused resources within thin provisioned devices.  Thin Provisioning implementations need to add this functionality as the value of using thin LUNs simply diminishes over time.

Summary

Overall, the product offers a wide range of device types.  A more detailed understanding of some specifics (e.g. encryption standards) is required.  Thin LUNs need some space release technology added to ensure thin doesn’t simply revert to thick over time. 

In the next post, I’ll look at security, performance and the competition.

Disclaimer: I have no connection or relationship to StarWind Software.  A free copy of the StarWind Server software was provided by the company for this evaluation.

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