On Nov 18, 2015, at 12:16 PM, Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net> wrote: > > Once upon a time, Warren Young <wyml at 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.