Choosing a NAS?

[Splash]

Ok, I see what you mean now - I guess we were just looking at different uses for redundancy. I was talking purely from the data's point - if the first server failed then you could always rename the 2nd server and give it the ip of the first server but what you're talking about would certainly require clustering.

[jim]

I've got offline backups I can use if the worst happens, I'm not too bothered about that.

Any redundancy via RAID/live backups would just be to prevent downtime. I'm anticipating about 5 PCs/network devices relying on certain data being available 24/7 so that's where it comes in useful.

[badass]

HP do a lefthand networks Virtual Storage Appliance.
They use a system they call Network RAID - basically 2 seperate appliances in permanent sync as a cluster so sort of like RAID-1 - just everything is duplicated rather than just the disks.

[Moby-Dick]

I'm not sure there is a community version of the LeftHand VSA sadly

[Splash]

For anyone interested these are the stats I'm getting out of Openfiler

iSCSI



SMB




If I get the chance I'll build FreeNAS on the same box and disks so you have something to compare. Interestingly Jumbo Frames doesn't seem to want to play with the Microserver NIC under Openfiler - I set it and then check again and it's back to 1500...


EDIT - can't get the iSCSI target to work under FreeNAS8, but SMB performance (same benchmark, same hardware but obviously on ZFS rather than MDRAID)

[badass]

For anyone interested these are the stats I'm getting out of Openfiler

iSCSI


SMB


If I get the chance I'll build FreeNAS on the same box and disks so you have something to compare. Interestingly Jumbo Frames doesn't seem to want to play with the Microserver NIC under Openfiler - I set it and then check again and it's back to 1500...

Are those stats for the Microserver?

[Splash]

Are those stats for the Microserver?

Fraid so

[b0redom]

Looks like it might be worth another look at Openfiler then.

[badass]

I'm getting lower figures on freeNAS but it's not an apples to apples comparison to yours currently.
I'll not be benchmarking further until I can work out how to replace a dead drive on freeNAS 8.0 RC5.
It's currently a VM and I've simulated a drive failure by deleting the virtual HDD. I can't even see any evidence that FreeNAS has recognised it's missing yet. Until I can do that, I'm not adding another Virtual HDD TBH.

[1stRaven]

If you are looking at syncing data over the weekend, you could always see if windows DFS and its sync options would work for you? Not sure if it is included in WHS but certainly is in the standard full licenses of windows server.

[Splash]

I'm getting lower figures on freeNAS but it's not an apples to apples comparison to yours currently.
I'll not be benchmarking further until I can work out how to replace a dead drive on freeNAS 8.0 RC5.
It's currently a VM and I've simulated a drive failure by deleting the virtual HDD. I can't even see any evidence that FreeNAS has recognised it's missing yet. Until I can do that, I'm not adding another Virtual HDD TBH.

The array's not flagged as degraded at all? Slightly concerning... My benchmarks are installed to a USB key, no hypervisor so you lose the slight overhead that would have. Not planning to do any more FreeNAS benchmarking as it takes bleedin' ages to build the array in Openfiler . Also now that I'm happy with the reliability and performance of Openfiler I plan to start moving data to it for proper use.

[badass]

I've dropped Freenas now and installed openfiler 2.99 on a VM
I've used the custom layout as part of the installation as per the how to on the openfiler site.
I've added 2 60GB Virtual HDD's to the openfiler VM (/dev/sdb and /dev/sdc)
I've created the Linux RAID array member partitions on both 60GB HDD's.
I've gone to software RAID, select RAID-1, click both disks, the add array button stops being ghosted, I click apply, wait and the array is never created.
If I try to create a RAID-0 array, it works.
At this rate, I'm just tempted to use Windows Server 2008 R2's NFS features TBH.

[Splash]

I'd be tempted to test the same scenario to see if it's limited to yourself Badass, but I'm still busy moving data at the mo. Will give it a shot in the morning, see if I can help you suss what's going on

[Jay]

My NAS

4 x 2TB in RAID 5

iSCSI



and for giggles my SSD

[alsenior]

Guess i'll chime in.

SMB



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This is after some speed tweeks to Samba and Dm-raid. host is Ubuntu 10.10 Kern 2.6.35-28-server-amd64

[Jay]

guess i'll chime in.

Smb



this is after some speed tweeks to samba and dm-raid. Host is ubuntu 10.10 kern 2.6.35-28-server-amd64

raid 10?