If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
TheCus devices seems to be rather powerful as well, and you can stack upto 5 units together. But that's where the line stops.
I'm now looking for something that could scale beyond 100TB on one device (not necessarily one unit though) and find it frustrating that most NAS's come in 1U or 2U at most.
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
So, what do you use? How well does it work for you? And, how reliable / fast / scalable is it?
On 12/11/10 8:15 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
see, I'd consider ReadyNAS to be SOHO, just what you said you didn't want.
I'm now looking for something that could scale beyond 100TB on one device (not necessarily one unit though) and find it frustrating that most NAS's come in 1U or 2U at most.
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
the big boys in NAS are Network Appliance aka Netapp. they will scale as large as your budget allows. The FAS6200 line scales to something like 1400 drives and redundant HA controllers.
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 6:31 PM, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
On 12/11/10 8:15 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
see, I'd consider ReadyNAS to be SOHO, just what you said you didn't want.
I'm now looking for something that could scale beyond 100TB on one device (not necessarily one unit though) and find it frustrating that most NAS's come in 1U or 2U at most.
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
the big boys in NAS are Network Appliance aka Netapp. they will scale as large as your budget allows. The FAS6200 line scales to something like 1400 drives and redundant HA controllers.
Yes, I know. But the problem I have with NetApp is that it's not build for a smaller market. i.e. a client looking to start small and scale as he needs, and can afford to.
The NetGear's allow exactly just that. One can start small and grow as needed. There's no need to over budget or over spend. Often a client only needs about 5 to 12 TB storage, but with high availability. I suppose the redundant PSU's do help a bit with that, and both TheCus and ReadyNAS can be setup in high availability with 2 devices.
Am 11.12.2010 um 17:38 schrieb Rudi Ahlers:
Yes, I know. But the problem I have with NetApp is that it's not build for a smaller market. i.e. a client looking to start small and scale as he needs, and can afford to.
The NetGear's allow exactly just that. One can start small and grow as needed. There's no need to over budget or over spend. Often a client only needs about 5 to 12 TB storage, but with high availability. I suppose the redundant PSU's do help a bit with that, and both TheCus and ReadyNAS can be setup in high availability with 2 devices.
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...).
It would be a waste of money to have a filer-head that can scale to 100TB sit with only 12TB. For 100TB, you need bigger filer-hardware. Most people who say "we need to scale to 100TB" never reach it - it's wishful thinking that their business will continue to grow like in the 1st year.
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 ;-)
BTW: what does the client do with the disk-space? What's the access- pattern?
Rainer
On 12/11/2010 09:24 AM, Rainer Duffner wrote:
With 100TB, DIY is out of the question ;-)
I wouldn't say that. It would be...challenging...but not out of the question.
But Aberdeen (note - I have no financial interest. They are simply someone I've seen marketing Linux based SAN/NAS machines before) has some not too insane pricing for a ready-built 132TB machine.
http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/8UDS-Nehalem-Linux-NAS.htm
On Saturday 11 December 2010 23:50 Jerry Franz wrote
On 12/11/2010 09:24 AM, Rainer Duffner wrote:
With 100TB, DIY is out of the question ;-)
I wouldn't say that. It would be...challenging...but not out of the question.
I don't see why it's out of the question. Why should it be? Nowadays it's not that much volume: 50 x 2 TB drives (+ parity drives depending on the type of RAID you're going to use + some spares).
A mid size storage array scales 2 - 3 times that much: LSI OEMs (SGI, IBM, SUN/Oracle), Bull's Optima 1500/2000, DDN's S2A 6620, ... And that's a single array with dual controller (active/active) so you've got HA in the array.
If you're going to set up an active/pasive pair of NAS heads, you don't even need the FC switches (those storage arrays have 4 - 12 FC ports so you can plug the servers right into the storage array controllers). You'd just need 2 servers that could scale in memory and I/O ... which is very common: mid level servers have 2 sockets (8 - 24 cores) and scale to around 96 GB and have 6 x PCIe slots.
If you _DO_ need active/active NAS heads, then you can go with GPFS/GFS/CXFS filesystems and you'd need a couple of FC switches.
[...]
Rafa
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Rainer Duffner rainer@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!
IBM sells some nice one rack units as well.
speaking of. anyone have any experience with the IBM DS3500 storage?
I've been considering the DS3500 for my dev lab storage. These come 24x2.5" (or 12x3.5") SAS 2U boxes with redundant storage controllers that have 2x2 SAS host ports and either 2x4 gigE iscsi or 2x4gb FC ports. you get to pay extra for more host partitions and stuff. they are basically rebranded LSI/Engenio 2600 and come in both 12x3.5" or 24x2.5" 2U SAS chassis... there's also SAS expansion ports you can add several additional storage bays to.
I have zero (0) experience with IBM branded storage. I do have a IBM Bladecenter and Power 520 AIX server in my lab, so I'm not all together unfamiliar with IBM.
On 12/12/10 08:56, John R Pierce wrote:
IBM sells some nice one rack units as well.
speaking of. anyone have any experience with the IBM DS3500 storage?
I've been considering the DS3500 for my dev lab storage. These come 24x2.5" (or 12x3.5") SAS 2U boxes with redundant storage controllers that have 2x2 SAS host ports and either 2x4 gigE iscsi or 2x4gb FC ports. you get to pay extra for more host partitions and stuff. they are basically rebranded LSI/Engenio 2600 and come in both 12x3.5" or 24x2.5" 2U SAS chassis... there's also SAS expansion ports you can add several additional storage bays to.
I have zero (0) experience with IBM branded storage. I do have a IBM Bladecenter and Power 520 AIX server in my lab, so I'm not all together unfamiliar with IBM.
I don't know about the DS3500, but I'm using a DS3200 with SAS HBA interface. It the moment it's used by a Fedora 12 box (I'm freezing on this release and awaits for C6 to appear), and it works just flawlessly. Nice, quite intuitive and informative admin interface which is accessible directly via TCP/IP to the storage unit (out-of-band) or using the SAS interface directly (in-band).
The only thing to pick on the admin interface is that it's Java and I had to tweak the start script a little bit to make it run as a non-root user via a VPN connection. Another thing is that an instance of the admin interface must be running for automated e-mail alerts if something happens.
Except of that, I'm very happy with it! The unit have 12 slots for disks and it is possible to connect more units together. Its also one available slot for another controller, so that two servers may use it via separate physical channels. It also have two power supplies as standard and it even complains badly if one of them is not connected.
The host adapter is the "IBM 3Gb SAS HBA Controller v2", which uses the mptsas (Fusion-MPT SAS) driver, so Linux support is present. I don't know, but I would even expect this driver to be recent enough in RHEL5/C5 as well.
I do not have any particular experience with other storage brands and I chose this one due to my very good experience with IBM servers and their Linux support. And I would definitely go out and by another IBM storage again if I needed to.
kind regards,
David Sommerseth
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 8:34 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Rainer Duffner rainer@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.
NetAPP's are far too overpriced for our needs. I need something more affordable.
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?
In one instance we need to host virtual machines, so we don't need anything fancy. I'm happy with running iSCSI / NFS and even AOE. Currently we have a few 2U SuperMicro servers with 24bays, running OpenFiler. But, OpenFiler is outdated and limited when it comes to scalability. Ideally, I would like to have a "single host" type setup, for when we move a client to a larger / new / different array, he still connects to the same host - i.e. for high availability.
For a different setup, one of our clients needs to store archived video footage of their CCTV system, which currently generates about 1TB's worth of data in one day. NetApp devices is simply off the scale when it comes to afford-ability in this case. What-ever we decide to go with needs to be cheap enough so that we can have 2x the setup for backup purposes.
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! _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Dec 12, 2010, at 5:17 AM, Rudi Ahlers Rudi@SoftDux.com wrote:
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 8:34 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Rainer Duffner rainer@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.
NetAPP's are far too overpriced for our needs. I need something more affordable.
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?
In one instance we need to host virtual machines, so we don't need anything fancy. I'm happy with running iSCSI / NFS and even AOE. Currently we have a few 2U SuperMicro servers with 24bays, running OpenFiler. But, OpenFiler is outdated and limited when it comes to scalability. Ideally, I would like to have a "single host" type setup, for when we move a client to a larger / new / different array, he still connects to the same host - i.e. for high availability.
For a different setup, one of our clients needs to store archived video footage of their CCTV system, which currently generates about 1TB's worth of data in one day. NetApp devices is simply off the scale when it comes to afford-ability in this case. What-ever we decide to go with needs to be cheap enough so that we can have 2x the setup for backup purposes.
Take a look at Equallogic.
Each enclosure is an independent unit that can work in cooperation with other Equallogic enclosures to form a storage group, from which volumes are created that are striped across group members.
Each enclosure comes with redundant controllers and for 10Gbe, dual interfaces, and for 1Gbe, quad interfaces, 4GB of cache memory.
Snapshots, replication, host integration tools are all included in he basic license (all features are available out-of-the-box at no additional charge).
Need some more performance? Buy another unit, add it to the storage group and your existing volumes will start striping across it.
SATA/SAS/SSD enclosure types available in 16 drive or 32 drive units.
The whole storage group is managed from a single IP address from any host that supports HTTP and Java.
-Ross
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Rudi Ahlers Rudi@softdux.com wrote:
In one instance we need to host virtual machines, so we don't need anything fancy. I'm happy with running iSCSI / NFS and even AOE. Currently we have a few 2U SuperMicro servers with 24bays, running OpenFiler. But, OpenFiler is outdated and limited when it comes to scalability. Ideally, I would like to have a "single host" type setup, for when we move a client to a larger / new / different array, he still connects to the same host - i.e. for high availability.
Have you tried nexentastor? It's free up to 18TB - not sure about pricing after that but there's a 45 day trial of the full featured version.
On Dec 12, 2010, at 11:34 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Rudi Ahlers Rudi@softdux.com wrote:
In one instance we need to host virtual machines, so we don't need anything fancy. I'm happy with running iSCSI / NFS and even AOE. Currently we have a few 2U SuperMicro servers with 24bays, running OpenFiler. But, OpenFiler is outdated and limited when it comes to scalability. Ideally, I would like to have a "single host" type setup, for when we move a client to a larger / new / different array, he still connects to the same host - i.e. for high availability.
Have you tried nexentastor? It's free up to 18TB - not sure about pricing after that but there's a 45 day trial of the full featured version.
Nexentastor is a good product, buy it's just a software product and doesn't build a tight redundant configuration. Plus there is the whole risk associated around Oracle controlling Solaris/ZFS development and bringing it in-house which may mean that companies that built their business off open source Solaris/ZFS might not survive long term.
-Ross
- Dell Equalogic - Very good experience, absolutly reliable - EMC CX Series - Wont´t buy them again, many Problems with the iSCSI - HP MSA - No Problems at all
Am 12.12.10 23:12, schrieb Ross Walker:
On Dec 12, 2010, at 11:34 AM, Les Mikeselllesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Rudi AhlersRudi@softdux.com wrote:
In one instance we need to host virtual machines, so we don't need anything fancy. I'm happy with running iSCSI / NFS and even AOE. Currently we have a few 2U SuperMicro servers with 24bays, running OpenFiler. But, OpenFiler is outdated and limited when it comes to scalability. Ideally, I would like to have a "single host" type setup, for when we move a client to a larger / new / different array, he still connects to the same host - i.e. for high availability.
Have you tried nexentastor? It's free up to 18TB - not sure about pricing after that but there's a 45 day trial of the full featured version.
Nexentastor is a good product, buy it's just a software product and doesn't build a tight redundant configuration. Plus there is the whole risk associated around Oracle controlling Solaris/ZFS development and bringing it in-house which may mean that companies that built their business off open source Solaris/ZFS might not survive long term.
-Ross
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
In one instance we need to host virtual machines, so we don't need anything fancy. I'm happy with running iSCSI / NFS and even AOE. Currently we have a few 2U SuperMicro servers with 24bays, running OpenFiler. But, OpenFiler is outdated and limited when it comes to scalability. Ideally, I would like to have a "single host" type setup, for when we move a client to a larger / new / different array, he still connects to the same host - i.e. for high availability.
I'd stay away from AoE for high availability, I've tried it at home but performance can fluctuate and the AoE driver present in CentOS 5 is way too old. I wasn't able to build a HA setup without corrupting data when failover occured.
For what I'm using AoE - to boot my mediacenter - exporting a single LVM LV, it works perfectly fine for me. For more serious uses, iSCSI is definitely the way to go.
On 12/13/10 12:44 AM, RedShift wrote:
I'd stay away from AoE for high availability, I've tried it at home but performance can fluctuate and the AoE driver present in CentOS 5 is way too old. I wasn't able to build a HA setup without corrupting data when failover occured.
Any HA block storage structure will have data corruption issues on failover if there was dirty write cache on the failed controller, unless it implements some form of cache mirroring. cache mirroring is rather expensive performance-wise and not doable with any off-the-shelf software I'm aware of.
Hi :)
On Saturday 11 December 2010 17:38 Rudi Ahlers wrote
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 6:31 PM, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
On 12/11/10 8:15 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
see, I'd consider ReadyNAS to be SOHO, just what you said you didn't want.
I'm now looking for something that could scale beyond 100TB on one device (not necessarily one unit though) and find it frustrating that most NAS's come in 1U or 2U at most.
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
the big boys in NAS are Network Appliance aka Netapp. �they will scale as large as your budget allows. �The FAS6200 line scales to something like 1400 drives and redundant HA controllers.
Yes, I know. But the problem I have with NetApp is that it's not build for a smaller market. i.e. a client looking to start small and scale as he needs, and can afford to.
What about a DIY NAS with an off the shelf server and storage array?
The NetGear's allow exactly just that. One can start small and grow as needed. There's no need to over budget or over spend. Often a client only needs about 5 to 12 TB storage, but with high availability. I suppose the redundant PSU's do help a bit with that, and both TheCus and ReadyNAS can be setup in high availability with 2 devices.
If you get your hands on COTS servers and storage arrays you can configure a NAS server with very good performance. If you can use GFS/GPFS/CXFS and configure a multi head NAS server you can sclae quite a lot. IBM sells this as SONAS, SGI also sells something similar with CXFS and you can do it yourself if you want it cheaper ;)
Scaling storage is quite simple if you use LVM + XFS: 1.- you add a new array or enclosure with its drives 2.- creat your RAID (5, 6, whatever) 3.- add the new RAID to your LVM 4.- grow XFS
You might need a couple of FC switches, depending on the number of of storage arrays, servers, and if you want HA.
I don't like appliances. Yeah, they're quite "easy/nice" to use, but it's a non stop paying for everything and quite a lock-in solution. Just MHO, mind you.
HTH
Rafa
On 12/11/10 9:29 AM, Rafa Grimán wrote:
What about a DIY NAS with an off the shelf server and storage array?
and how do you avoid single-point-of-failure? if that COTS goes down, your storage is offline, and you've lost any writes in progress.
enterprise storage has fully redundant *everything*, a dual filer HA NetApp box will not even blink if any subsystem fails. cached write data is mirrored in both controllers so if one controller croaks, the other can flush the buffers for it, and client storage connections continue without a hiccup. yes, you pay for this.
On Saturday 11 December 2010 18:37 John R Pierce wrote
On 12/11/10 9:29 AM, Rafa Grimán wrote:
What about a DIY NAS with an off the shelf server and storage array?
and how do you avoid single-point-of-failure? if that COTS goes down, your storage is offline, and you've lost any writes in progress.
enterprise storage has fully redundant *everything*, a dual filer HA NetApp box will not even blink if any subsystem fails. cached write data is mirrored in both controllers so if one controller croaks, the other can flush the buffers for it, and client storage connections continue without a hiccup. yes, you pay for this.
As I said a bit further down in my previous e-mail: you can use GPFS, CXFS, GFS as its filesystem and have redundant hardware.
If you want to get a better idea, check out SONAS from IBM. It's basically GPFS + Samba and redundant HW. You get HA, high performance, modularity and flexibility. You can also check out:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/006apr05/features/gfs/
If you don't want to shell out what IBM is going to charge you, you can DIY (if you have the knowledge) or you can hire some Linux consultant that has a good Linux knowledge.
HTH
Rafa
John R Pierce wrote:
On 12/11/10 8:15 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
see, I'd consider ReadyNAS to be SOHO, just what you said you didn't want.
I'm now looking for something that could scale beyond 100TB on one device (not necessarily one unit though) and find it frustrating that most NAS's come in 1U or 2U at most.
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
the big boys in NAS are Network Appliance aka Netapp. they will scale as large as your budget allows. The FAS6200 line scales to something like 1400 drives and redundant HA controllers.
And they will charge as much as your budget allows, too.
On 12/11/10 8:15 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
oh, another. NexSAN ... this is more SAN block storage than NAS file storage, but you can put a NFS server between your NAS clients and it for NAS functionality.
the SATAbeast is like 48 SATA drives, for up to 84TB raw (typically you'd want to reserve some hotspares and some level of raid striping, say, 7 x 6-way raid5)
these don't have the same level of total redundancy as a NetApp Filer has, but they are way cheaper.
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Rudi Ahlers Rudi@softdux.com wrote:
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
I setup a Netgear ReadyNAS for a small office client and found the performance to be lacking. I could only get 10-15MB/s on a gigabit network.
So, what do you use? How well does it work for you? And, how reliable / fast / scalable is it?
For my own NAS I use CentOS and mdadm across a few TB drives. Performance gives me 30-40MB/s from Windows clients using Samba. Of course this route means you need to roll your own HA solution.
If you want off the shelf performance, scalability, and reliability expect to pay $15k plus. For the office I am using a Dell MD3200i iSCSI SAN with redundant controllers and switches. I have a few ESXi boxes connected. One guest is a Windows box with a lun mapped for file sharing. Performance is decent, reliability is there, and it is easy to expand by adding additional bricks.
Ryan
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Rudi Ahlers Rudi@softdux.com wrote:
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
TheCus devices seems to be rather powerful as well, and you can stack upto 5 units together. But that's where the line stops.
I'm now looking for something that could scale beyond 100TB on one device (not necessarily one unit though) and find it frustrating that most NAS's come in 1U or 2U at most.
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
So, what do you use? How well does it work for you? And, how reliable / fast / scalable is it?
NetApp is probably the first place to look. I don't have personal experience with it, but others in my company like the IBM XIV. It installs as a whole rack (with some extra requirements for weight and cooling) but I think they have a 'pay for what you use' plan and can fill the drives in as needed.
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We're using two different products that qualify under that heading.
For NAS devices, which are our primary backup medium, we use the QNAP TS-809U-RP. Not stupidly fast but for backup's they're decent. Some might argue they're SOHO but for our use, they do what we need.
Now for the primary SAN at head office we use the D'Link xStack DSN-5110-10. 12 disks in 2U. We ponied up for the redundant controller model which gives us true HA. On our model we can scale up by an extra three drive chassis if we wish, giving us up to 48TB (based on 1TB SAS disks). The 5210 & 5410 will scale up to an extra six chassis giving the user up to 84TB, more if they spring for 2TB SAS disks.
On Sat, 2010-12-11 at 18:15 +0200, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
EMC AX4 SAN (iSCSI)
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
EMC - Scalability is never an issue.
I'm now looking for something that could scale beyond 100TB on one device (not necessarily one unit though) and find it frustrating that most NAS's come in 1U or 2U at most.
Go EMC. Support is solid and the units are well designed.
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
On Dec 11, 2010, at 5:11 PM, Rainer Duffner rainer@ultra-secure.de wrote:
Go EMC. Support is solid and the units are well designed.
But-But - they run Windows on the low-end stuff, don't they? ;-)))
I think they run embedded windows on some of their high-end stuff as well.
If done properly the embedded OS in the device is of little consequence, you'll only ever interface with it through a web interface or standalone client and updates are done through "firmware" upgrades.
As long as it performs and scales as advertised I don't care if it runs AmigaOS under the hood.
-Ross
On Dec 11, 2010, at 11:15 AM, Rudi Ahlers Rudi@SoftDux.com wrote:
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
TheCus devices seems to be rather powerful as well, and you can stack upto 5 units together. But that's where the line stops.
I'm now looking for something that could scale beyond 100TB on one device (not necessarily one unit though) and find it frustrating that most NAS's come in 1U or 2U at most.
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
So, what do you use? How well does it work for you? And, how reliable / fast / scalable is it?
I use Equallogic and it performs very well and it scales quite good as well.
It's quite a bit more then Netgear but it's enterprise level
Though it's iSCSI only, so if your looking for CIFS/NFS included then it's not for you. I provide file services through virtualization and even the extra licensing costs, it's way cheaper then EMC/NetApp NAS head licensing (and guaranteed compatible too).
-Ross
On 12/11/2010 11:15 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
TheCus devices seems to be rather powerful as well, and you can stack upto 5 units together. But that's where the line stops.
I'm now looking for something that could scale beyond 100TB on one device (not necessarily one unit though) and find it frustrating that most NAS's come in 1U or 2U at most.
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
So, what do you use? How well does it work for you? And, how reliable / fast / scalable is it?
Two things: QNAP coraid
coraid is in the Linux Kernel(don't know about Cent 5 though) but you can also look into them directly as well..:)
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 5:07 PM, William Warren hescominsoon@emmanuelcomputerconsulting.com wrote:
On 12/11/2010 11:15 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
If you use any NAS (or a SAN) devices, what do you use? And I'm referring more to larger scale network storage than your home PC or home theater system.
We've had very good experiences with our NetGear ReadyNAS devices but I'm in the market for something new. The NetGear's aren't the cheapest ones around but they do what it says on the box. My only real gripe with them is the lack of decent scalability.
TheCus devices seems to be rather powerful as well, and you can stack upto 5 units together. But that's where the line stops.
I'm now looking for something that could scale beyond 100TB on one device (not necessarily one unit though) and find it frustrating that most NAS's come in 1U or 2U at most.
Maybe I'm just not shopping around enough, or maybe I prefer to well known brands, I don't know.
So, what do you use? How well does it work for you? And, how reliable / fast / scalable is it?
Two things: QNAP coraid
coraid is in the Linux Kernel(don't know about Cent 5 though) but you can also look into them directly as well..:) _______________________________________________
It may just be due to the limited suppliers we have with these devices in South Africa, but I found the TheCus devices to perform better than the QNAP's that I could get hold off. I'm still looking for a Coraid supplier....
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