As Storage Switzerland continues its test drive of the Gridstore Scale Out NAS the next step was to take a tour through the GUI. A key testing area with scale out or grid storage systems is how well does the system’s management software deliver on the promise of multiple storage servers acting as one.

This promise requires a balance between managing the grid vs. managing the members that is made difficult because there are times during the administrative day that you want to manage all these nodes as one entity while there are other times when you want to be able to see and manage the individual nodes. I am happy to report that the Gridstore handles this challenge quite nicely.

First off Gridstore's management software runs as a Microsoft Management Component (MMC) plug-in. This is welcomed news to the Windows administrator who avoids having to learn a new GUI and have it running along with all the other management consoles from multiple applications and devices. The test drive of the GUI can be seen in the video below and certainly does it more justice than we could write about.

The important takeaway from our testing of the GUI is that Gridstore has successfully balanced the management of a single grid while allowing detailed inspection of the nodes within that grid. Without reading the manuals we have been able to set up the grid, create volumes and manage those volumes, something I would not think we would be as successful at on other systems.

The one fault that occurred, because we didn't power up one of the nodes, was quickly found and corrected. We rate the Gridstore GUI as a success thus far. The next step is to expand the number of nodes in the cluster and to expand the volumes that are already created.