[clue-tech] NAS solution

[Angelo Bertolli]

Patrick H. wrote:
> Does anyone know of any fast but not-so-expensive NAS solutions? My 
> company currently uses several EMC clariions for our storage, but 
> theyre getting extremely expensive.
> I've looked at solutions such as OpenFiler, NexentaStor, and FreeNAS, 
> none of which are mature enough for our use. We need something that is 
> fast, stable, and supports over-tcp replication. All in all, we'll be 
> needing about 20TB or storage, but it can be split up into multiple 
> devices/whatever as it doesnt need to be a single 20TB filesystem.
>
> Putting a solution together from scratch on linux is possible, but 
> it'd be nice to use something put together and proven reliable, as 
> downtime is EXTREMELY bad.
I have to admit I don't know the throughput rates on these but there are basically 3 main types we use:

* One Xyratec SAS attached 24-bay chassis (model HB-2435-EB21) with 1 TB drives will give you about 18 TB of usable space.  We use these with 2 software RAID6 sets on Linux. The drives are SATA.

* A little cheaper are the mpak raid units (model A24U-G2421-1) that are SCSI attached.  Also 24 bay with 1 TB drives, they're not quite as nice in my opinion because the native Linux SCSI driver only allows for a 2TB attached device.  (You can compile the driver for your card if you want, and remove the restriction.)

* Data Direct Network attached storage.  This is the fastest and most expensive solution, and really probably overkill if you only want 20 TB.  http://www.datadirectnet.com/

Contact me if you need more information and want to contact the vendors we use.


-- 
Angelo Bertolli
http://angelo.bitfreedom.com/

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