20th April 2012
Today we took delivery of 2 x Thecus N16000 devices to test their speed and to see if they do provide 100% uptime for Enterprises.
We have 52 Thecus I8500 and N8800X devices in production.

All of the usual information about the N16000 can be found on the many blogs and reviews out there. Our results published here are from real-life tests.

Our testing requirements
1. Full 100% fail over (HA) from one device to another.
2. 10G and jumbo frames speed test.
3. Layer 3 switch capability.
4. Ease of use.
5. Value for money.

Our platform
2 x Thecus N16000.
Seagate 3TB 6G SATA disks.
2 x HP Procurve 3500yl-24g layer 3 switches using MPIO.
HP Proliant DL 360 G7 server and 64GB RAM.
Windows 2008R2 Enterprise running Hyper V.

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Our testing results.
1. Full 100% fail over (HA) from one device to another.
Result: This did work after a few attempts. The manual isn’t very clear on this aspect and could do with a good proof read. The HA worked as expected and did work if we pulled the power on the primary NAS. We did manage to break the HA by simulating erratic power outages which resulted in both devices thinking they were the primary. Having said that, in a production environment these would be protected by a UPS, therefore that issue wouldn’t occur. HA doesn’t support multiple RAID though, this can be restrictive and not mentioned in the manual.

2. 10G and jumbo frames speed test.
Result: We didn’t get a chance to test the 10G because we couldn’t get the HP 10G modules for the switch and at time of writing, a native 24 port 10G switch is around the £10K mark. Jumbo frames worked as expected.

3. Layer 3 switch capability.
Result: In a data centre environment we rely on layer 3 switching for security purposes. Whereas the LAN\WAN adapter would support a default gateway, however the 2nd NIC and additional NICs had no option to support a default gateway. This meant they couldn’t natively be put into a layer 3 switched environment. We can get around this by using a front iSCSI connector such as Starwinds; nonetheless a slight dent in the ‘Enterprise’ statement from Thecus.

4. Ease of use.
Result: Wre die-hards fans of Thecus (especially the i8500), so Thecus score a 10\10 here. There are loads of features on the Thecus NAS’ and they will do most things for most people.

5. Value for money.
Result: 10\10 again here. We have yet to find anything as well-made and cost-effective as the N16000.

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Issues
Limited native support for layer 3 if you are using more than one NIC.
The manual could be clearly.
Support is by way of next day email. That is a fair trade-off for us considering the cost.

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Overall
Another good product from Thecus.
We mounted numerous VMs using Hyper V directly from the N16000 and these performed better than when they were run on the HP Proliant’s local SAS disks.
If you need a lot of data; give an N16000 a go!

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Further notes