[Gllug] Cheapish NAS.

Wed Feb 17 21:45:22 UTC 2010

JLMS wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 4:01 AM, general_email at technicalbloke.com
> <general_email at technicalbloke.com> wrote:
>   
>> 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 will not even try to address the throughput, I have never had to
> care much about it, normally what has been provided to me has been
> good enough (performance was not an issue, security and availability
> were), in any case, £350 sounds awfully little, that would be aiming
> for one of the most basic machines you can find, so most likely the
> quality of the components will be on the lacking side of things. If on
> top of that you put RAID5 (which is notoriously inefficient for
> writes) then you are asking for trouble.
>
> Disks are so cheap that for this solution I would buy  2 as big as
> affordable and do a mirror, avoiding the performance penalty of RAID5.
>
> I don't know how much you charge per hour or day, but £100 to set up
> such a thing seems awfully little to me.
>   

That's just to put the box together, throw a NAS OS on it and test it
briefly, that's only part of the full installation job so I'll be
charging for my time on site installing the thing too.

Thanks for all the advice everybody, although I'm sad to hear (almost)
nobody thinks the black boxes are good enough for moderate small office
stuff :/ I'd really like this to be a set and forget type job. Are there
any of these devices people would feel happy using if the budget was a
bit more, say £600? Do bear in mind it WILL be getting backed up too!
(as I say that's pending discussion)

Their current "server" is essentially a low end desktop machine in a
tower case: single 2Ghz P4, 20Gb system disk, 150Gb file storage disk,
both IDE. They seem fairly happy with the speed but they're out of space
(I must admit it's surprisingly snappy to browse around).

>   
>> 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?
>>     
>
> You are really stretching it there, I am not sure if a P4 has the CPU
> juice to run OpenSolaris+ZFS (gut feeling says no)..
>
> A Solaris or OpenSolaris would do an excellent sync machine: you rsync
> your main machine to your Solaris server and take a snapshot once the
> sync is in place. If you need to recover your main machine then you
> can refer to your snapshots in Solaris.
>   
> <snip>
>
> As much as I would like to say that Linux could work here I am pretty
> favourable to the Solaris solution, the only major caveat being what
> Oracle's intentions are regarding the Solaris OSes.
>   

Yes, I really like the idea of a ZFS based snapshot backup box (or
bttrfs when it's production ready). Performance shouldn't be much of a
concern really as it would only need to serve anything if the main
storage goes down. Of course, the reason I wanted a black box solution
was to avoid the need for regular maintainance. How much of a job is it
keeping a simple OpenSolaris samba server up to date? I heard there's no
free automatic patch stream, how would one cope with that and how often
would intervention be neccessary? (excepting the obvious "just pay for
it then" answer!)

Looking a little deeper I think you're right about the P4, no biggie
though as I've heard the 64bit dual core atoms give decent enough
performance for this kind of thing and mobo+chip ~ £65 right now.

Of course if that's good enough to use as a backup box maybe I could do
the same thing for the NAS itself - now we're back to square one! Add
into the mix that freeNAS seems to do ZFS too and I'm going to have to
go back to the drawing board...

Once again thanks for everyone's suggestions and advice, keep em coming :)

Cheers,

Roger.

>   
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Roger.
>>
>>
>> * i.e. Better than their current backup regime. I know the other options
>> ought to be "very well backed up" too but I haven't got round to talking
>> backup with him yet, he currently just plugs in one of two USB HD's in
>> every other day and seems fairly happy doing that. I think using RAID 0
>> for the main server would mandate a more serious, regular, automated
>> backup system!
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>>     

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