Want power in a small, low cost package?

The Iomega crew continue to impress me.   They push through issues (there was a wide spate of drive failures that I saw hit a lot of people), continue to add functionality at a rapid pace, and refresh the hardware fast.   A+ for adaptability.

So – the new desktop units are here, and they are doozies…

World, welcome to the PX4-300d and PX6-300d.

So – what’s new?   On top of a swank new industrial design, there’s a LOT under the covers.   Here’s the shortlist:

• Bring your own disk configurations (yeah!  that one was overdue)
• SSD support (have 10-100 VDI users with View or Xen Desktop?   This is a new interesting choice)
• Intel Atom dual core-design and dual GbE interfaces boost both iSCSI And NAS performance a LOT.
• out of the box support for the new Lifeline software (lots of fixes for RAID and a ground-up iSCSI target rewrite mean better performance)
• out of the box support for the really, really cool Personal Cloud offering (basically, your PX unit can be shared in a “DropBox like way” (but with no monthly service charge).   There’s an iPad/iPhone/Android app for this right around the corner.
• Centralized management – if you have multiple Iomega devices, there’s a new swank client you can use to manage them all in an integrated way… Nice.

Personally – I’m picking up a couple.   For what it’s worth – Virtual Geek followers know that I budget for a pile of Iomega and iPads every quarter.  I use these as “thank you” for customers, EMCers, VMware folks, and partners for all sorts of things.    I’ve been holding off and depleting the older IX4/IX2 and iPad gen 1 inventory, and am now stocked up with the new stuff…   So – soon I’ll launch the next Virtual Geek contest with PX4/6 and … stay tuned!

BTW – think about this – how much stuff must we have in store for next week at EMC World for us to announce this today, rather than next week?   If you haven’t registered for EMC World yet, what is wrong with you? :-)

Congratulations to the iomega crew on the birth of their new babies, I think they are awesome!   For more info – read on!

Ok – let’s look at these in more detail…

• Bring your own disk configurations (yeah!  that one was overdue)

Yup – I was always frustrated that you couldn’t pickup a diskless or partially populated Iomega IX2/4 and get your own disks.   Glad to see Iomega respond and fix it – frankly I never really agreed with their logic (which BTW, has some merit).  The iomega team’s point was that most customers buy based on $/GB and ease through their acquisition channel (i.e. is it available in the store you’re in or the online retailer you use).   Yes…  BUT… there are a lot of nerds like me that don’t mind a little home assembly, and can save some $$.  We may be the exception rather than the rule, but hey – collectively we are influencers.

So – you can get the PX4 empty, with 2 disks, or with all 4.   Likewise, the PX6 comes empty, with 3 disks, or with all 6.   There are Iomega-provided parts for disks – but I’m interested to see what people (including me) do :-)

• SSD support (have 10-100 VDI users with View or Xen Desktop?   This is a new interesting choice)

So – we had a bunch of people try SSDs in the older IX generation, and frankly the SoC hardware was just not up to the task.  We now have a LOT more horsepower as noted in the next bullet, and they also have 2GB of RAM.   That’s a lot more oomph.    This is going to be interesting, IMO.  There are some funky use cases for this, particularly with the 3rd gen of SSDs from OCZ, Sandforce, and Intel hitting the market with almost double the performance of the 2nd gen, and about half the cost for a given capacity.

• Intel Atom dual core-design and dual GbE interfaces boost both iSCSI And NAS performance a LOT.

This is awesomesauce if you ask me.   Early on, if you were using the IX4/2 for anything beyond pretty basic NAS use, customers would hit the headroom of the SoC pretty fast.   Don’t get me wrong – it’s been brilliant for me personally for all my photos, docs, TimeMachine backups, and movies.   My little IX4 in the basement streams to my Xbox 360 and PS3 like a champ.   But, pressed into some enterprise use cases, it would struggle.

The uplift in performance of the Dual Core Intel Atom + 2GB RAM design is huge relative to the previous generation of SoC from Marvell and others.

• out of the box support for the new Lifeline software (lots of fixes for RAID and a ground-up iSCSI target rewrite mean better performance)

• out of the box support for the really, really cool Personal Cloud offering (basically, your PX unit can be shared in a “DropBox like way” – but with TONS of storage, and NO service charges.   Oh, and it can replicate remote using a “only changes get replicated” async replication mechanims (no, SRM support is not  there yet – working it).

• Centralized management – if you have multiple Iomega devices, there’s a new swank client you can use to manage them all in an integrated way… Nice.

Since you’ve elected to read on… there are a couple other cool bits…

• RAID 6 support (and RAID 5 with a hotspare) in the PX6, with a new easier storage pool configuration UI

• Windows DFS support.
• VLAN support

There’s actually so much more – it would make for too long a blog post :-)   Will be starting a contest post EMC World for people to win some of these, stay tuned!!!

Comments

[Brent Ozar]

Great info, but might wanna include product links to make further research a little easier:

PX4-300d: http://go.iomega.com/en-us/products/network-storage-rack/px4-px6/px4-300d/?partner=4760

PX6-300D: http://go.iomega.com/en-us/products/network-storage-rack/px4-px6/px6-300d/?partner=4760

[Solori]

Looks impressive, Chad, especially for PX6 applications in small, budget constrained applications. You mentioned the headroom on the SOC for the IX series, based on the specs provided by IOMEGA, the Atom dual-core seems to be the big "data mover" logic.

Do you have any additional info to share on how RAID levels may be accelerated in hardware or is Atom the sole processor? I'd be interested in seeing some headroom data on the new PX line-up...

[Stuart Buckland]

I'll admit I haven't paid much attention to Iomega over recent years. With these new products I should be watching them more closely in future.

My Readynas pro should last me for a few more years though before my uses outgrow it's capabilities. Wheb the time comes to replace/supplement I now have a new option to consider.

[Duncan]

What a great new product! Both the PX4 and the PX6 look great. Just imagine loading the PX6 up with 6 SSD drives :)

[Barry Weeks]

If it was your business would you bid a PX with SSD's for a customers VDI solution? Is it really a viable product or a showcase of performance within some specific boundries?

[Chad Sakac]

@Barry, I absolutely would. The KEY consideration would come down to a basic question. The PX (and all Iomega platforms) are non-clustered, and are missing features that are "classic" enterprise storage. For consumers and SMBs - they are unbelievably feature rich.

If non-HA (the brains are a SPOF) design is acceptable, and those additional features aren't needed (which for very small VDI deployments - often are OK), then yeah.

If not, I'd go VNXe (for low hundreds) of users or VNX (for hundreds to thousands of VDI users).

Thanks for the question!

[A Facebook User]

Great information. I've been fretting over what to do with my proposed VDI implementation (VMware View) as to storage. I'd love to have a "real" SAN but I just don't think we're quite at that point. I've tried some iSCSI NAS (won't mention vendor) and for VMware the results have been disappointing.
I think we're going to go with a px6-300d for 'regular' storage and a px4-300d with SSD's for the "replica" disks. I'll run two SSDs mirrored. And if I get to the point where I'm not feeling so good about my data security I'll just build another and replicate them or something. Same with the 'regular' storage. And I still won't have spent what I would on a "real" SAN...
Oh, forgot to mention < 100 users.

[Drew]

"...out of the box support for the really, really cool Personal Cloud offering (basically, your PX unit can be shared in a “DropBox like way” – but with TONS of storage, and NO service charges. Oh, and it can replicate remote using a “only changes get replicated” async replication mechanims (no, SRM support is not there yet – working it)."

- So how do you set up "only changes get replicated" with async replication? This is essentially how DropBox works, which is what I want, but I haven't been able to find any iomega documentation on how to set this up.

Can you or someone explain, or at least point me toward some form of documentation? Thanks!