Kano Technologies NetCOR 7500
Test Score: 3.3 out of 5

Editor's note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, for a full rundown of how it fared in our testing across iSCSI SAN Server categories; please see our full coverage.

Kano's NetCOR 7500 is a 2U device with 12 SAS/SATA drive bays (ours came with 750GB SATA drives) and two independent controllers, all in a custom chassis coupled using a passive backplane. The NetCOR 7500's controllers are really independent systems, each with six gigabit Ethernet ports and SAS expansion ports. Additional 12-disk SAS/SATA drive shelves can be attached to the expansion ports.

The elegant hardware design of this system, with so many hot-swappable components and built-in high availability, is very attractive. The NetCOR 7500 also has the lowest price per gigabyte ($1.49) for any device with built-in high availability.

The NetCOR 7500 has both GUI and command-line interface management access, with the GUI being a layer riding on top of the CLI. In fact, whenever you execute a command in the GUI, it briefly shows you the actual CLI command that the device is running underneath. The NetCOR 7500 can be entirely managed by the GUI, if you want to stick with that, although the insistence on mapping GUI operations one-to-one to CLI operations does create some clumsiness.

One of the nice features of the NetCOR 7500 is that its dual controllers appear as a single device. Although virtual disks are assigned to different controllers for performance reasons, the network manager never has to know that they are connecting to two different controllers — the NetCOR 7500 exposes a single IP address for all iSCSI management.

Because we did experience some interoperability and load-balancing issues — which Kano was able to resolve — this product really deserves an "A" for effort but a "B-" for actual execution. Kano needs to put some more quality assurance time into these devices. We also were discouraged at the limited snapshot, off-system logging, thin provisioning, and replication capabilities for a product that sports such a high-end design. Kano is offering the snapshot features (previously a separately licensed product) as a bundled part of all new product sales starting in August 2008.

While the NetCOR 7500 needs some work to compete in the high-end enterprise market, the strong pricing, expansion capability and simple management make it an ideal solution for midrange enterprises.