Re: What NAS device(s) do you use? And why?

[Ross Walker <rswwalker@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 12, 2010, at 5:17 AM, Rudi Ahlers <Rudi@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 8:34 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Rainer Duffner <rainer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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 But, OpenFiler is outdated and limited when it comes to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

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