Iomega ix12-300r

Today I was pleased to see the announcement of the Iomega ix12-300r, moving on from the success of the ix4-200d and r Iomega latest device supports up to 12 disks, have 4 Gb connections and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. The ix12-300r

The key features for the device are as below

Capacity: Starting at 4TB (4 x 1TB SATA-II Hard Disk Drives HDDs) with maximum capacity of 24TB (12 x 2TB SATA-II Hard Disk Drives)
4-drive disk packs enable expansion to 8 or 12 drive configurations
RAID Support: On-disk data protection and organization configurable as RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10. Automatic RAID rebuild and hot swap drives.
iSCSI Support: Provides block-level access for the most efficient storage utilization, especially for database and email application performance.
VMware® Certified: HCL certified NAS (NFS) and iSCSI storage for VMware ESX (vSphere)
Multiple network interface cards (NICs) can be configured for I/O failover
Expandability: Add storage capacity by simply adding drives in the unpopulated drive bays. Added drives can be brought into an existing Storage Pool or made into a new Storage Pool. Additionally, USB connected Hard Disk Drives can be attached and used as shares. The StorCenter ix12 supports read and write on Fat32, NTFS, or ext2/ext3 formatted hard disks; read only of external HFS+ formatted drives.

Video

Virtualisation Use Cases

Backup

As with the ix4-200d / r the ix12-300r would offer a fantastic staging area for virtualised environment backups. Paired with a good backup product like Veeam an affordable storage device like this means you can keep many restore points online for quick restoration. With a larger amount of disks comes greater IOPS and the possibility to potentially speed up backups further.

Test and Development

The ix12-300r would be an ideal device for test and dev, saving you space on a costly production SAN. Whilst the rack mount form factor wouldn’t really be suitable for many home labs, I can see this new device being a great ISO store / template store, as well as a staging area for new virtual machines in a business environment.

SMB Production Storage

Using a single controller type device in a production environment always makes me a little uneasy, I am a great fan of building in as much redundancy into your virtual environment as possible. But in very small environments (e.g. two ESX hosts) or branch offices the ix12-300r could be the very device you are looking for. Teamed up with a good backup strategy (Maybe Veeam and a ix4-200r) and understanding of the limitations / risk the could be the device you need.

Conclusions

It looks like Iomega with EMC’s support has done it again, the ix4-200d changed the look of many people VMware home labs and SMB backups, it looks like the ix12-300r could do the same for small office and branch office environments and test and dev / 3rd line storage. I look forward to getting my hands on one and seeing how it performs. In the mean time I would love to hear your views and use cases on this new product.