[CentOS] What NAS device(s) do you use? And why?

Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel at gmail.com
Sun Dec 12 06:34:24 UTC 2010


On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Rainer Duffner <rainer at ultra-secure.de> wrote:

> The other question is if it actually works.
> Too many of the low-cost devices eat the data on the drives, when the
> motherboard or the controller fries...
> With luck, you can read the data on one of the drives...
>
> If the client only needs 12TB, there's shurely a NetApp that is
> cheaper but only scales to 10 or 20TB.
> If the client has maxed that out and needs to go beyond that, he needs
> to buy a bigger filer-head + shelves and migrate his data (AFAIK,
> that's possible, at a charge...).

NetApps are wonderful. So is a Hercules transport. Amazing pieces of
engineering, completely unsuitable for home use due to expense of
underlying hardware and excessive sophistication of high availability
components which, in a modest environment, is more easily done with
rsnapshot and a few of the cheapest drives.

12 TB, well, there you're getting into noticeable storage. What are
your requirements? High availability? On-line snapshots? Encryption?
Do you need that 12 TB all as one array, or can it be gracefully split
into 3 or 4 smaller chunks to provide redundance and upgrade paths, or
put different data on different filesystems for different
requirements?

> You might want to try to get a quote from Oracle for a Unified Storage
> Appliance 7320 and compare it with one of NetApps entry-level offerings.
>
> With 100TB, DIY is out of the question ;-)

IBM sells some nice one rack units as well. All of them play nicely
with CentOS, but you need to think about the actual connecton. GigE
and NFS, which works surprisingly well? Sophisticated permissions with
Samba 3.6, NFSv4 and NTFS compatibility with a NetApp QTree? Or just a
big honking array to store all the porn and Bittorrent movies to brag
about?

> BTW: what does the client do with the disk-space? What's the access-
> pattern?

Indeed. Details! Details matter!



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