On Nov 18, 2015, at 12:16 PM, Chris Adams linux@cmadams.net wrote:
Once upon a time, Warren Young wyml@etr-usa.com said:
- They’re serious server-grade machines, not borderline flimsy boxes competing largely on price. Built in and supported from Silicon Valley, not China. :)
iXsystems sells rebadged SuperMicro stuff, nothing special (not made in Silicon Valley).
Good to know, though I must say, the SuperMicro stuff I’ve used is a cut above typical desktop PC or commodity grade hardware. Not on par with super high end stuff, but well above average.
iX found and fixed a FreeBSD kernel NFS bug, but it was a painful experience.
I see that story in the exact opposite way: iXsystems found and fixed the problem, expending heroic levels of effort to do so.
By contrast, I’ve had several $300-500 NASes become unmountable for one reason or another, and the vendor was no use *at all* in getting it remounted. I had to rebuild the NAS from backups each time.
It’s rather annoying to buy a NAS, then later realize you need to buy *another* NAS as a mirror in case the first one roaches itself. Isn’t that what redundant storage is supposed to avoid?
Meanwhile, I’ve never had a ZFS pool become unmountable, even when the disk enclosure hardware was failing underneath it.
Then, early this year, we had a node fail, and it took them almost a month to get us a replacement.
That’s not good.
But have you gotten better turn time from the $300-500 NAS providers for the same service?
Did you opt for advance replacement, and if not, why not?
Their idea of HA is to monitor the ethernet links, not the services;
Do the $300-500 NAS boxes even try to do HA failover?
even though we have multiple links in a LAG
I’ve also had trouble with FreeBSD’s lagg feature. Fortunately, my use case allowed me to switch to a round-robin DNS based load balancing scheme instead. I don’t think you can do that with NFS, by its nature.
And today, when trying to open a ticket, their website is broken because one of their DNS servers is returning 10.0.0.240 for part of their website (where the CSS is served).
Yes, I noticed their site was running awfully slowly. Embarrassing, but I don’t see what it has to do with the quality of their FreeNAS boxes.