Iomega Ix2-200 2x1GB

Okay now that I have my first post out of the way which explains the direction that this blog will take I intend to talk a little bit about the Iomega Ix2-200d device. I have been assigned a project which involves deploying about 20 of these devices to remote locations.

Well first impressions, I was really impressed with these devices. Iomega claims that these units feature full SNMP, SMTP, and RAID 1. They claim that they also support iSCSI, R-Sync and Cifs. Let me be the first to tell you, many of these features are flawed or buggy and some just don't work. I feel like these devices could have used much more development time and here are some of the areas I think need more attention:

• SNMP - First, the MIB was nearly impossible to find. Some genius over at Iomega decided that a good place for the MIB file would be in a hidden directory on the cd. I contacted the web support to ask for a location and the agent literally had no clue what a MIB file was. The alerting from the device is only triggered in 3 broad categories, rather than specific events. Things like rebuild of RAID mirror successful are reported as the highest severity errors. Additionally, some events like failure of backup jobs are not even logged in SNMP although SMTP alerts are sent?!?
• R-Sync Backup Jobs - Well this was a total flop. These devices are not capable of receiving and copying to a secured folder. What does this mean in layman's terms? If you have a source lets say user data where users have permissions, you must copy to a completely unsecured destination folder on the remote unit. This is not acceptable any company.
• Support - Well their support leaves quite a bit to be desired. In calls to their help desk I am averaging about 30 minutes of wait time, followed by about 50 minutes to get anything resolved or to get to the point where the analyst understands what I am asking. Likewise, their online chat feature offers quick access to analysts but I have had chats run upto 50 minutes most of the time the online chatters have no clue and end up googling to attempt to find a solution. Questions as simple as what port is this widget running on, or where is the MIB take quite a while to answer.
• Power Supply - Well there is no 220v power supply available.
• Hot Swap - Don't assume that because these devices use SATA II drives that they are hot-swappable, because they definitely aren't.
• iSCSI - Well this one worked, I was able to successfully mirror data on a novel server.
• Heat - Drives do run warm when being worked hard. 

Let me wrap it up like this, these devices have potential but it is completely destroyed by the crappy interface software. These devices would be great for home use, but the Enterprise IT functions like SNMP for monitoring definitely leave something to be desired. All-in-all these devices are not quite ready for primetime, the hardware is there and great but the software is terrible.