[NTLUG:Discuss] NAS devices

[Randall Weyers]

Just to bring up the real pros in the NAS marketplace I work with both 
NetApp and EMC. They have pretty intuitive interfaces and in the case of EMC 
the entire system is built on Linux. They work well and there are entry 
level boxes availible for small businesses that are expandable to 120 
drives. so you do not have to keep rebuying the equipment. The drawback is 
that you cannot just pick up a drive at Fry's and repalce one. The systems 
have some self healing built in and are very easy to set security on. They 
offer CIFS ISCSI and NFS at speeds of 2gig per min and up. (done with 
etherchannel)  They are resposive enough to use for a citrix enviorment of 
6000 users at 25 percent of utilization.

Your friendly neighborhood Storage System Administrator.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Cox" <cjcox at acm.org>
To: "NTLUG Discussion List" <discuss at ntlug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 11:39 AM
Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] NAS devices


> MadHat Unspecific wrote:
>> Ralph wrote:
>>> Howdy,
>>>   I get to spec out and probably buy a NAS for the office.  I see some 2
>>> U servers that have 8 exposed 2.5 inch drive bays.  When I think of 2.5
>>> inch hard drives, I don't think of drives that can take heavy use.  Are
>>> these new drives built better than laptop drives?  Is SAS better than
>>> SATA?  SAS drives seem to go up to 146 GIG and SATA up to 500 GIG.  At
>>> least, that is what Pogo Linux says.  I don't need huge amounts of
>>> throughput.  But, reliability is very important.  Any comments?
>>
>> I can only speak from personal experience.  I do IT consulting and I
>> have installed several 1U servers for clients over the past few years.
>> I have seen more and more starting to use the 2.5" drives.  They can fit
>> 3-4 drives in the 1U to use RAID 5, where before it would only hold 2
>> drives.  In the time I have used these, I have only had 1 drive fail out
>> of 50 or so.  The speed and size of these drives has seemed fine.  I was
>> shocked when I first saw them as well, but have been happy with the lack
>> of issues I have seen.
>>
>>
>
> BUT, in all fairness Lee, they haven't been around long enough.
> I mean, how old are you oldest 2.5" SAS based units?  (they'll be Sun
> boxes since they were the first to deploy)
>
> I think we need another year or two before I'll say anything about
> their reliability over 3.5" SCSI.
>
>
>
>
>
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