What NAS do you use?

[SoftDux-Rudi]

I'm in the market for a new NAS and would like to see who uses what?


I need something that is rackmountable, and preferably within 2U - 4U space limit.
It needs to have 2x (or more) GBe NIC's - 10GBe addon would be nice
minimum 8 drives, upto 24 - SATA & SAS
redundant power supplies
Needs to support RAID6 & RAID10 with EXT3/4 (EXT4 is preferred), ZFS and XFS
needs to allow multiple different RAID set's - for example 1x RAID1 with SAS, 1x RAID10 with SATA & 1x RAID6 with SATA

I got a few Thecus 8800PRO's recently, and they seem nice but I'm not too impressed with them. Support is also non-existent.
At the same time I had a look at the Netgear ReadyNAS 3200 & 4200's but they would have cost'ed twice of what the Thecus costs me and they don't support RAID10

[smargh]

Your mention of 10Gb, 24 disks & redundant PSUs - presumably for a business? - sounds like you might be better off going to EMC/NetApp/HP/Dell/IBM etc for an RFP.

[b0redom]

Why are you mixing ZFS and RAID? Just do ZFS across the whole lot and SMB/CIFS/NFS everything off it? I know Sun did some 'Thumper' boxes which are designed just for this, but it looks like they're no longer available. Perhaps check NetApp?

One thing you should be very clear about, having a 24disk RAID/ZFS array is suboptimal - rebuild times will be ludicrous.

[SoftDux-Rudi]

Your mention of 10Gb, 24 disks & redundant PSUs - presumably for a business? - sounds like you might be better off going to EMC/NetApp/HP/Dell/IBM etc for an RFP.

NetApps are simply un-affordable in our country, so is EMC - which is sold by the same distributors.

I'm just curios as to who uses what.

Why are you mixing ZFS and RAID? Just do ZFS across the whole lot and SMB/CIFS/NFS everything off it? I know Sun did some 'Thumper' boxes which are designed just for this, but it looks like they're no longer available. Perhaps check NetApp?

One thing you should be very clear about, having a 24disk RAID/ZFS array is suboptimal - rebuild times will be ludicrous.

In some cases ZFS is slower than EXT3. And, the whole thing with Oracle and ZFS's future is a bit meek right now. Same with XFS, it's great for large files, but not with small files. I prefer to use the right FS for the job at hand.

24 spindles won't take long to rebuild, if it's on RAID10 or RAID6 - in which case only the 2 drives involved with the data rebuild will be slow. But, I'm looking for something that gives high IOPS at an affordable price. More spindles = more speed

[b0redom]

You've not actually said what you're using this for, home or small office, or large corp. I'm guessing one of the former. I presume you're planning on some sort of hardware RAID card, and not software RAID.

ZFS is slower than EXT3? In what sense? You're comparing apples with oranges. EXT3 is just a file system, whereas ZFS is a complete volume manager with iSCSI, NFS and SMB built in. It also uses copy-on-write, so that you will never need fsck unlike Ext3 etc.

ZFS is actually open sourced, it's just not GPLd (it uses Sun's CDDL which is incompatible) which is why it's also in FreeBSD, but not in Linux - for that reason I don't think that it's going to go away. ZFS's main competitor BTRFS is currently heavily sponsored by Oracle who now also own ZFS, so it will be interesting to see what they do with it longer term.

I'm not sure how much mid-high end storage experience you have, but I can assure you that even with a high end disk controller, a RAID rebuild is going to take a long time, and spanning across 24 spindles is just asking for trouble. Even with RAID-6/10, the chance of multiple disk failures whilst the recalculations are happening is too great for me. At least with ZFS the rebuild time is proportional to the size of the data, rather than the array. You know that the thing which takes the time is recalculating, rather than just writing the 0s and 1s right?

If you really need the performance, maybe you should consider 3x8 arrays, you're more protected, and more performant in that case, although as ever there is a trade off with space.

Personally I used OpenSolaris 151 (which was released at the beginning of December) with this card:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/a...C-SAT2-MV8.cfm

To present raw devices which are then aggregated into a large ZFS RAID-Z2 array.

I use OpenSolaris over BSD, Linux or Windows as it seems to be the only OS which will not dynamically renumber disks. That is if you have drives on controller port 0,1,2,3 and disk 0 dies on a reboot, as far as I know all other OSes will renumber 1->0, 2->1, 3->2. This created all sorts of weird problems for me when I had a duff cable in my storage box.

[dirky]

Look into norco rpc 4220 and fill it with your own hardware