Unoffical empeg BBS

Quick Links: Empeg FAQ | RioCar.Org | Hijack | BigDisk Builder | jEmplode | emphatic
Repairs: Repairs

Page 2 of 2 < 1 2
Topic Options
#318538 - 28/01/2009 09:56 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: jimhogan]
BartDG
carpal tunnel

Registered: 20/05/2001
Posts: 2616
Loc: Bruges, Belgium
Originally Posted By: jimhogan
Originally Posted By: wfaulk
Or FreeNAS.


Ah! We have them surrounded!

There's also NASLite. This one isn't free, but it's still very affordable with it's $30 price tag. The advantage over FreeNAS is it's better performance (twice the speed is no exception!). On the other side, it does not allow any rights management, which FreeNAS and OpenFiler do.

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, while NASLite is based on Linux. OpenFiler is based on CentOS. I haven't tried OpenFiler (yet) myself, but I'm very curious to know how well it works and what it's performance is. It's very hard to find reviews for any of these apps. I've found a few (old ones) for FreeNAS and NASLite, but I've not been able to find any for OpenFiler, which is somewhat surprising.

Oh, and then there's also Open-e. This is a solution not really meant for home use, but they do have a nice trial version which could be used a home since it offers enough for most home users. (biggest downside is storage space is limited to 2TB). Might be worth to try.
_________________________
Riocar 80gig S/N : 010101580 red
Riocar 80gig (010102106) - backup

Top
#318543 - 28/01/2009 11:52 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: matthew_k]
hybrid8
carpal tunnel

Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
Originally Posted By: matthew_k
[quote]I bought 1.5TB drives as soon as they were released, and they made a beta firmware update that week to make it work


I'm assuming you're talking about a beta firmware for the NAS. If those are Seagate drives, make sure you update their firmware as well. I'm sure you've seen reports of the issues with the Seagate 1.5TB firmware causing the drives to time-out.
_________________________
Bruno
Twisted Melon : Fine Mac OS Software

Top
#318549 - 28/01/2009 15:01 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: wfaulk]
matthew_k
pooh-bah

Registered: 12/02/2002
Posts: 2298
Loc: Berkeley, California
Quote:
ESX doesn't need anything special from an NFS server. You could just set up a regular old Linux box with a big disk.

Great for a lab environtment. If we're going to put our eggs in one basket, it's got to be a reliable basket with someone else to blame if something goes wrong. Which seems to put you back in the 10k SAN range, with 5k of that going for the "someone to blame". Which means the economics of a 5 to 10 server rack doesn't make a whole lot of sense, even though we can get vmware itself at a fairly steep discount.

I suspect this will change as vmware is no longer owned by a storage company, and as VMWare goes after the low end that microsoft will be going after. There's no reason they can't sync disk images over the management wire, even if it's a little slower.

Top
#318550 - 28/01/2009 16:03 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: matthew_k]
wfaulk
carpal tunnel

Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
And your solution to that is to run OpenFiler? I mean, there's nothing wrong with OpenFiler, but if all you need is an NFS share (which is all you need for ESX), the only thing it gains you is a configuration utility. There's certainly no one to blame.

I suppose you could go with Solaris instead. Sun developed NFS, there's support, and you can get an x86 box from them relatively cheaply.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk

Top
#318551 - 28/01/2009 16:15 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: matthew_k]
tman
carpal tunnel

Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
Originally Posted By: matthew_k
Great for a lab environtment. If we're going to put our eggs in one basket, it's got to be a reliable basket with someone else to blame if something goes wrong. Which seems to put you back in the 10k SAN range, with 5k of that going for the "someone to blame". Which means the economics of a 5 to 10 server rack doesn't make a whole lot of sense, even though we can get vmware itself at a fairly steep discount.

You can still run it over NFS. Running ESX off a NetApp filer via NFS is a supported configuration and gives you several benefits over doing the same with iSCSI. Thin provisioning is one major one. The ability to do a flexclone is another big one.

Originally Posted By: matthew_k
I suspect this will change as vmware is no longer owned by a storage company, and as VMWare goes after the low end that microsoft will be going after.

EMC still owned the majority of VMware the last time I looked.

Originally Posted By: matthew_k
There's no reason they can't sync disk images over the management wire, even if it's a little slower.

You can do that already. It just isn't recommended for the same reasons you want to have somebody to blame if something goes wrong with your SAN.

Top
#318553 - 28/01/2009 17:10 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: tman]
Phoenix42
veteran

Registered: 21/03/2002
Posts: 1424
Loc: MA but Irish born
On VMware HCL are the Iomega ix2 and ix4-100 (I can't find it).
Granted I don't know If I'd want to run much of anything off of them...
On the cheap (cheap is relative...) iSCSI front Dell has the MD3000i, and EMC have their AX range, as do most of the other storage players.


Top
#318554 - 28/01/2009 17:12 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: wfaulk]
matthew_k
pooh-bah

Registered: 12/02/2002
Posts: 2298
Loc: Berkeley, California
Quote:
And your solution to that is to run OpenFiler?

No, my solution is to keep buying real servers. I was wondering if someone was using OpenFiler in a situation where their ass was on the line, as that's more of a vote of confidence for it than I've heard so far.

Top
#318555 - 28/01/2009 17:58 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: matthew_k]
andym
carpal tunnel

Registered: 17/01/2002
Posts: 3996
Loc: Manchester UK
Originally Posted By: matthew_k
Quote:
And your solution to that is to run OpenFiler?

No, my solution is to keep buying real servers. I was wondering if someone was using OpenFiler in a situation where their ass was on the line, as that's more of a vote of confidence for it than I've heard so far.


I have a small OpenFiler at work, admittedly it's still at the testing phase. But everything seems to be okay. I've got some Samba/NFS shares for office workers and some iSCSI targets for our edit suites. Assuming we go ahead, I'm looking at pair of clustered Openfiler machines, one at each site.

Our sister company uses NetApp filers, but we simply don't have the money. So we make do with what we can afford.
_________________________
Cheers,

Andy M

Top
#318556 - 28/01/2009 18:00 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: matthew_k]
tman
carpal tunnel

Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
Originally Posted By: matthew_k
Quote:
And your solution to that is to run OpenFiler?

No, my solution is to keep buying real servers. I was wondering if someone was using OpenFiler in a situation where their ass was on the line, as that's more of a vote of confidence for it than I've heard so far.

I wouldn't. iSCSI Target is just a module but you'd want to find somebody that is willing to give the level of support you require. RHEL don't seem to officially support it but thats just from random searching now.

Top
#318558 - 28/01/2009 18:24 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: matthew_k]
wfaulk
carpal tunnel

Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
We happen to have some NetApp filers for other reasons, so I have my ESX disk images stored there, but if we didn't, I wouldn't think twice about installing a generic x86 machine as an NFS server. I'd probably use Solaris as opposed to Linux because I'm happier with their LVM solutions, but NFS is solid.

Then again, I'm not a big fan of having someone to blame. It's pointless. Even if I could (or wanted to) point my finger, I'd be the one who chose them in the first place. Support, though, is a different story, and I can understand the desire to have an expert on call.

I don't know what you're intending to use ESX for, but I find it to be far more useful for Windows machines than anything else, because running multiple things on a single Windows machine can be a bad idea, and then you end up with a bunch of machines vastly overpowered for what they need to be doing. With VMWare, you can effectively have a bunch of really wimpy machines combined into one or two physical servers.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk

Top
#322972 - 04/06/2009 00:50 Re: NAS box recommendations [Re: wfaulk]
drakino
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
I figured I'd bump this for the ReadyNAS owners here. Just found out about ReadyNAS Remote, a secure tunnel solution for accessing the NAS on the road.

http://www.readynas.com/?p=1435

Top
Page 2 of 2 < 1 2