[Gllug] Cheapish NAS.

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

Andy Millar wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 04:01 +0000, general_email at technicalbloke.com
> wrote:
>   
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I could do with a bit of advice, it seems I have an embarrassment of
>> options to choose from! The question is what would be the best
>> replacement for my client's ancient win2K file server. They are an
>> architects office with ~6 PCs on Gb Ethernet. Many files are quite large
>> so throughput fairly important. Budget is ~£450 (pre VAT) for hardware
>> and they want at least 1.5Tb of usable space in it. Expandability is
>> desirable (naturally) but not pivotal.
>>     
>
> I'd argue that that budget is far too small. How important is this data
> to the client? Are they really valuing it that low?
>
>   

I sense they're pliant on price but at the end of the day they're a
small office and the solution ought to be proportional. Enterprise grade
solutions are all well and good but lets not forget what the I in RAID
stands for! I think the max I could sell them on would be about £600,
esp as they will need to scale their backup upward too (and I'm not sure
they're really considered that cost yet!).


>> Drobos only kicking out 12MB/s (bleugh!? Can that be true?).
>>     
>
> You can stream HD TV from the USB-attached Drobos, no idea about
> Droboshare.
>
> When poorly configured, I've got 16 drive storage arrays that can't beat
> 10MB/s of sequential write. Just because some people have performance
> problems doesn't mean that it's a problem with the device. It could be
> with the transport they are using or their machine's configuration.
>
>   

The thing is there's no config to get wrong with a Drobo so I'm more
inclined to trust the naysayers reports. With modern SATA drives capable
of at least 60MBs each and all that extra redundancy offering potential
read speed gains I'd expect the droboshare to really fly and I get the
impression that it doesn't. I have to say that having played with
freeNAS I'm going off the idea of an off the shelf black box, pretty
though those boxes may be!



> Openfiler is nice.
>   

I'll take a look when I've finished evaluating freeNAS then. Ain't
open-source grand! :)



>> I'm eager to know what you would do. All advice warmly welcomed, even if
>> it's "your budget isn't big enough!". I have to say I'm very tempted by
>> Option 1: almost zero maintenance and virtually no time to setup is a
>> big win IMHO but I'd rather recommend the right thing than satiate my
>> laziness! ;)
>>     
>
> We recently picked up a Thecus N9900 for testing. 
>
> http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=11&pid=199&set_language=english
>
> iSCSI performance hits wire speed (GigE) without any trouble and the
> device seems solid as a rock. It supports:
>
> - Samba
> - NFS (but performance appears dire)
> - FTP
> - WebDAV
> - iSCSI
>
> They retail for about £1300 for the chassis from scan.co.uk. Given what
> you're looking to pay, something like their N4200 might be a place to
> start? They also come with a rather easy to use web interface.
>   

Wow, that looks great, however pls bear in mind that my client, far from
having a well cooled 19" equipment rack has his router and switch piled
on top of the microwave in the kitchen! The N4200 looks good at first
glance, just about within budget and low maintainance, thanks for the tip.

Cheers,

Roger.
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