[Gllug] Cheapish NAS.

[Andy Millar]

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 can think of 3 options / strategies so far...
> 
> Option 1 - Little NAS boxen like the 2nd gen Drobo+Droboshare and the
> Qnap TS-419P Turbo NAS. My first concerns with those are the throughput
> though. Does anyone own/use one of these things (over Gigabit LAN), if
> so what kind of performance are you seeing? I've head tale of 4 drive
> 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.

> My other concern is the difficulty of data recovery should they fail.
> I'm guessing it's the same situ as a hardware raid controller popping:
> only the exact same model is going to get you your data back (so unless
> you keep a spare handy a failure could mean serious downtime). Are there
> any NAS boxen who's contents you can recover by directly attaching them
> to a PC or do they all work like this? If that's the case then I suppose
> (though I'd REALLY love to avoid the hassle of it) I could build them...

This is why you take backups.

> Option 2. A small PC based server with a 3 disk software RAID 5,
> possibly running FreeNAS or OpenFiler. Given that I don't really want
> the hassle I'd want to charge at least £100 for my time building &
> testing the thing. That would leave ~£350 for all the bits. Does that
> seem realistic for a box with reasonable performance (say avg 40MB/s
> throughput)? I've never built a raid based system before, how much more
> to recovering is there than just slinging all the drives in a fresh box
> and hitting the power switch if, say, the mobo suddenly died? Pls bear
> in mind I'm no linux ninja, almost all my work is supporting Windows &
> Mac at the domestic level and I just switched my workshop machine to
> Ubuntu a mere 18 months ago!

Openfiler is nice.

> The third option I can see is to go for a cheap 2 * 1 Tb NAS enclosure
> (~£250), set it to RAID 0 (for high performance) and use the balance of
> the money to make sure it gets very well backed up every day*. I was
> thinking a salvaged p4 box (they have a couple spare) w/ a 2Tb disk &
> open solaris so I could use ZFS and do an rsync + snapshots every few
> hours? Of course I've never setup a business grade backup system either,
> does the above sound like a even half sane plan?

0 is the amount of data you will recover if you have a disk fail. RAID0
is never worth it. ever [ever [...]].

> 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.

This doesn't cover the issue of backups, and you will probably want
significantly more backup space than you have of primary storage so you
can store some form of revision history of data on your primary device. 

Andy
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