Promise M610i

The Promise M610i has been our go-to unit of choice for the last several years in our datacenter.  The M610i is a hardware based iSCSI/SATA storage unit that allows you to build your own SAN with whatever hard drives you want.  This reduces vendor lock-in for hard drives, and significantly reduces the cost of the storage system. 

We've found them to be reliable, inexpensive, and they perform well for the price point.  Over the years we've populated Promise systems with everything from 250GB SATA drives to 1TB SATA drives and everything in between.  The performance has remained relatively static though due to the static spindle count and 7200RPM rotating speed of those spindles.

The Promise systems incorporate RAID 0,1,5,6,10, and 1E (a form of RAID10 that allows you to use an odd number of drives).  They are hardware controller based, and feature dual gigabit Ethernet ports that can be bonded together.  It also incorporates a web-based management interface, automatic notifications, and a host of LED's that indicate power, activity, and failed drives.

For someone that is just starting out in the SAN world the M610i is a very attractive option with little experience necessary.  The only drawbacks are when you want to expand the units or if you want better caching.  The Promise system allows for a maximum of 2GB of RAM for caching, so if you want additional caching you'll have to shell out for a much more expensive unit.  The Promise unit does not allow for adding additional JBOD enclosures.  This limits you to a maximum of 16 spindles per system.  We would have loved to continue using the M610i's if we could increase the spindle count.

Overall our experiences with the M610i units have been very good.  We plan on doing an in-depth review of one of our M610i units at a later date to give a little bit better insight into the management and feature set of the units.