Broadberry CyberStore 316S WSS – Another Great Windows Storage Server 2012 Review

Hi Folks –

Outside of my awesome wife and two adorable little girls, nothing makes me happier than reading another great review on a storage appliance running Windows Storage Server 2012! On that note, I was pleased to see this PC Pro review of the Broadberry CyberStore 316S-WSS, which says that the system “offers good value, great performance and massive expansion potential.”

Another review by IT Pro calls the same model “a cost-effective network storage appliance built on a solid hardware platform offering a remarkable expansion potential.” It goes on to say that the system “delivers an impressive range of unified storage features and teams this up with high data reduction ratios.”

Broadberry Data Systems, one of our partners in the U.K., is now offering Windows Storage Server 2012 across its entire WSS line of storage appliances. Each system from Broadberry is custom-configured and built-to-order, enabling customers to get exactly what they want in reliable, cost-effective storage.

All CyberStore WSS models are rack-mount and are delivered ready-to-deploy, with Windows Storage Server 2012 preinstalled. All systems are subjected to a 48-hour testing period prior to shipping.

• The smallest unit in the model line is the CyberStore 104S WSS—a 1U unit with one Intel Xeon E3 series processor and room for four 3.5” drives. The CyberStore 108S WSS is similar but supports eight 2.5” drives.
  
  
  
• The largest (in terms of storage space) is the CyberStore 436S WSS, a 4U unit with room for two Intel Xeon E5 2600-series processors, 16 DIMMs, and 36 3.5” disks. That’s 144TB of raw capacity! The CyberStore 472S WSS is similar, but with room for 72 2.5” drives.

In-between these two extremes are several additional 1U, 2U, 3U, and 4U models with various drive and memory capacities. You can check out the entire WSS model line here.

Broadberry CyberStore 104S WSS and CyberStore 436S WSS.

So Many Options!

One thing I really like about Broadberry is the number of configuration options they provide. For example, in checking out the company’s CyberStore 104S WSS, I counted seven processor options and dozens of hard drive options—including SAS and SATA drives from Seagate as well as SSD drives from Toshiba, Intel, sTec, and Seagate. You can even chose from three SSD caching kits!

Options for larger systems are even more extensive. The CyberStore 436S WSS provides 14 processor options, similar drive options to the 104S, and your choice of 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB DIMMs. You can also choose from three LSI RAID controllers/application accelerators and 19 different network adapters, including 1GbE and 10GbE NICs Intel, 10GbE NICs from Solarflare, and Fibre Channel to PCI-E (4x and 8x) host bus adapters from Qlogic.

Customers that need more storage can connect any of these storage appliances to one of the company’s JBOD enclosures. Broadberry offers models ranging from a 12-disk unit to a 45-disk unit.

Sales are Growing

Colin Broadberry, the company’s CEO, says that the 316S WSS (3U, 16x3.5” drives) and 424S WSS (4U, 24x3.5” drives) are most popular—and becoming more so every day. He attributes the increasing popularity of storage appliances based on Windows Storage Server 2012 to:

• Versatility. Windows Storage Server 2012 is designed to run on industry-standard hardware, so there’s no vendor lock-in, which means that customer options are virtually unlimited and they can choose the configuration that suits them best.
  
• Simple licensing. Licensing for Windows Storage Server 2012 is very simple; with a single license, customers have access to all the new features in the software.
  
• Straightforward upgrades. Customers want to upgrade their current Windows-based environments, in which they have Active Directory and other features already deployed, and are finding process of migrating to Windows Storage Server 2012 to be an easy one.
  
• Support for virtualization. More and more customers are running Hyper-V and see significant value in Windows Storage Server 2012 features such as Hyper-V Replica (which enables simple, cost-effective disaster recovery through automated replication of VMs from one site to another over a network link—without reliance on third-party software replication technologies or hardware-based SAN replication.)
  
• Rich enterprise feature set. Other top features that are helping Broadberry to sell Windows Storage Server 2012 include data deduplication, support for thin provisioning, storage pools and Storage Spaces, Windows PowerShell 3.0 for task automation, and Active Directory Dynamic Access Control.

Broadberry is a great example of a Windows Storage Server 2012 partner—and the reason we built the product the way we did. The company’s mission is to give customers exactly what they want, and Broadberry is taking advantage of Windows Storage Server 2012 running on industry standard hardware to do just that.

Congratulations to the Broadberry team!  They’ve been selling Windows Storage Server solutions for as long as I can remember, I highly recommend you check them out in the UK.

Cheers,
Scott M. Johnson
Program Manager
Windows Storage Server