Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking at using Linux as a NAS / SAN device, and would like some input from other's who have done this before?
I've bought two SAN devices in the past couple years, both run Debian and both are tier 1 enterprise storage arrays. Of course you wouldn't know they ran Debian or linux unless you tried to telnet to them on port 22 and saw the SSH banner. http://www.3par.com/inservtclass/
My active-active NAS head units runs CentOS 4.4 on IBM hardware (back end disk storage provided by above array) http://www.exanet.com/default.asp?contentID=209
How would it compare to commercial SAN devices, Thecus N8800SAS (http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=11&pid=177&set_language=...) or something similar to these?
I would probably use hardware RAID 10, and could go with either SAS / SATA, and then probably offer iSCSI, Samba. NFS & rsync. In terms of servers hardware, well either Tyan / SuperMicro / Intel / Dell would be fine as well. But, my question is rather from a linux point of view, how would Linux compare to dedicated NAS devices, in terms of the OS managing the device?
If you use a purpose-built appliance OS it should be pretty comparable, e.g. openfiler or freenas(bsd based?) to something like a Thecus. I used openfiler about 1.5 years ago mostly for iSCSI and it worked ok, at one point had 4 shelves of HP MSA SCSI disk drives attached to it each connected to dedicated RAID cards on an older HP DL585.
I'm looking to get a Thecus N770 myself pretty soon, mainly for the smaller integrated form factor with many drive bays.
nate