Re: [Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build
On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 2:47 PM, Tom Metro tmetro+...@gmail.com wrote: It seems that either of these needs could be addressed quickly and fairly cheaply with an off-the-shelf appliance, like: $140 QNAP TS-231 2-bay http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.aspx?sku=556803 I liked the features of this setup, and so i just plunked down my ~$400 to get this and two 2TB WD red drives. (I ended up buying through Amazon since I didn't really want to make a special trip to Cambridge to go shopping.) Greg Rundlett https://eQuality-Tech.com https://freephile.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build
On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 9:38 AM, F. O. Ozbek oz...@gmx.com wrote: Didn't IBM leave the hardware business entirely (including the servers last year)? You probably purchased Lenovo servers labeled as IBM servers. If Intel architecture, yes. They were doing the off-shore builds prior to sale, so as with the laptops, the first generation or two post-sale are IBM designed, and wear IBM skins when sold by IBM enterprise solutions. The higher end boxes have very enterprise-y reliability/repair features, good for the biggest clusters. The lower end boxes weren't much more featureful than whitebox. Unclear to me from the PR on the sale if IBM still owns their Power/Cell architecture underlying AIX OS. -- Bill Ricker bill.n1...@gmail.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build
On 7/4/2015 9:38 AM, F. O. Ozbek wrote: Didn't IBM leave the hardware business entirely (including the servers last year)? IBM sold the System x business to Lenovo. IBM retains its System z and Power Systems businesses. You probably purchased Lenovo servers labeled as IBM servers. Other way around: we purchased an IBM server and two IBM storage arrays with Lenovo badges on them. Much better option would have been to purchase SuperMicro servers instead. Not really. It would have been a hassle trying to get the MIT VP Finance Office to approve the purchase whereas the IBM/Lenovo vendor was recommended by VPF. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build
On 07/03/2015 08:26 PM, Richard Pieri wrote: Last year I specced out some high-end compute servers (2 by Xeon 10-core, 384GB) with a pile of storage (80TB) from Dell and IBM. The compute portions were essentially identical prices. The Dell storage was 2 x 12-bay SAS storage arrays with SATA (NL-SAS) drives; the IBM storage was 2 x 12-bay SAS storage arrays with SAS drives. Both sets of storage arrays cost about the same. The Dell SATA drives cost ~$14K *MORE* than the IBM SAS drives. You read that right. SATA drives on the order of twice the cost of SAS drives. Our Dell rep refused to budge on the price even after we showed him the IBM quote. Dell did not get the sale. Didn't IBM leave the hardware business entirely (including the servers last year)? You probably purchased Lenovo servers labeled as IBM servers. Much better option would have been to purchase SuperMicro servers instead. -- F. Ozbek. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build
On Fri, Jul 03, 2015 at 08:26:31PM -0400, Richard Pieri wrote: Last year I specced out some high-end compute servers (2 by Xeon 10-core, 384GB) with a pile of storage (80TB) from Dell and IBM. The compute portions were essentially identical prices. The Dell storage was 2 x 12-bay SAS storage arrays with SATA (NL-SAS) drives; the IBM storage was 2 x 12-bay SAS storage arrays with SAS drives. Both sets of storage arrays cost about the same. Out of curiosity did you compare with iXSystems? I have no association with them, only I sometimes watch the BSDNow podcast which they sponsor (and Kris Moore works for them doing PCBSD), so I often see their advertising. The show talks about freenas from time to time, e.g. episode 34. I'm curious how they compare when evaluated objectively, but I have no use for nas (or any new hardware) presently so would not take the time to compare myself. -- Mike Small sma...@sdf.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build
This is a perennial topic, but I'm in need of some NAS storage and figured I'd see what the current leanings are of the group. I haven't yet figured out exactly what my requirements are, but I'm probably looking to end up with two NAS units for office storage, where one acts as primary and one as backup. Not sure yet whether I'll go with identical hardware on both, so they can be swapped, or have the backup be lower-end, and use a JBOD configuration instead of RAID. Needs are fairly low-volume (no more than a few simultaneous users), and modest (10 TB) capacity. In my personal infrastructure, I'm also pondering whether to split off storage from my MythTV server to a dedicated NAS. I had a hardware failure with my MythTV server recently, and had storage been separate from the server, I could have at least carried on viewing shows read-only from the recordings made prior to the failure. Of course without making the storage redundant, the NAS box then becomes the single point of failure. It seems that either of these needs could be addressed quickly and fairly cheaply with an off-the-shelf appliance, like: $140 QNAP TS-231 2-bay http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.aspx?sku=556803 Or something similar from Synology or one of the other appliance vendors. (I haven't decided yet whether to target a 2-bay or 4-bay enclosure. The appliances seem to double in price for 4-bay, even though not much product cost is added. Probably an inflated margin.) While I don't want yet another Linux server to maintain and keep updated, I'm also not crazy about running the customized versions of Linux that exist on these appliances. These vendors all seems to now support various cloud modes where the appliance phones home to the vendor to make your files accessible off-LAN. No doubt that can be turned off, but what else might be buried in there? I don't really need the hand-holding and add-on apps these platforms provide. Are there any fully open source firmware versions available for these appliances? I'd ask if FreeNAS has been ported to any of them, but given the way FreeNAS seems to have moved towards requiring more enterprise hardware (ECC RAM, and lots of it), that seems unlikely. If you do go the build route, there doesn't seem to be any way to approach the compact packaging of the appliances, or the pricing. Just the enclosure and hot-swap bays (a bit of steel and plastic) can end up costing as much as the appliance above. The HP micro servers that have been discussed here several times have gone out of production, I think. In any case, they seem a bit dated now. This blog seems to have a regularly updated NAS build in several flavors and links to components, like NAS oriented enclosures and NAS optimized motherboards, that can be hard to find at most PC parts retailers: http://blog.brianmoses.net/2015/01/diy-nas-2015-edition.html And economy flavor: http://blog.brianmoses.net/2015/05/diy-nas-econonas-2015.html (And from another source, a video that talks about building a NAS using much the same components as the non-economy 2015 build above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYBok-XGsKMfeature=autoshare ) And then there are software decisions...if ZFS is a must, then that pretty much dictates using D-I-Y hardware. Similarly if I want to use a cluster file system, rather than rsyncing between my primary and secondary NAS. I'm not sure any currently available open source NAS solution provides the ideal functionality when it comes to capacity upgrades. I'd still like to see an open source equivalent to the Drobo where capacity expansion is as simple and dropping in an additional drive. (The blog above says ZFS capacity expansion requires rebuilding the FS.) -Tom -- Tom Metro The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting. http://www.theperlshop.com/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build
On 7/3/2015 4:30 PM, Derek Atkins wrote: I plan to build a freenas box. I can get a 24-bay 4U case and build into it for about the same price as a synology that can only hold half the disk space and a fraction of the ram.. Neither of which are microservers. the disk and ram was the vast majority of the price. If you compare the two with no (or minimal) storage then you'll find that the prices are pretty close to each other. Drives is where the gouging is these days. Last year I specced out some high-end compute servers (2 by Xeon 10-core, 384GB) with a pile of storage (80TB) from Dell and IBM. The compute portions were essentially identical prices. The Dell storage was 2 x 12-bay SAS storage arrays with SATA (NL-SAS) drives; the IBM storage was 2 x 12-bay SAS storage arrays with SAS drives. Both sets of storage arrays cost about the same. The Dell SATA drives cost ~$14K *MORE* than the IBM SAS drives. You read that right. SATA drives on the order of twice the cost of SAS drives. Our Dell rep refused to budge on the price even after we showed him the IBM quote. Dell did not get the sale. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build
I plan to build a freenas box. I can get a 24-bay 4U case and build into it for about the same price as a synology that can only hold half the disk space and a fraction of the ram.. the disk and ram was the vast majority of the price. -derek Sent on my mobile. Please forgive any typos. - Reply message - From: Richard Pieri richard.pi...@gmail.com To: discuss@blu.org Subject: [Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build Date: Fri, Jul 3, 2015 2:28 PM On 7/3/2015 2:47 PM, Tom Metro wrote: I'd ask if FreeNAS has been ported to any of them, but given the way FreeNAS seems to have moved towards requiring more enterprise hardware (ECC RAM, and lots of it), that seems unlikely. ECC RAM is a requirement for full ZFS integrity, and lots of it is for deduplication. The former is good to have in any kind of storage appliance or server, and putting the L2ARC on fast SSD reduces the dependency on the latter assuming you even want to use in-band dedup. If you do go the build route, there doesn't seem to be any way to approach the compact packaging of the appliances, or the pricing. Just the enclosure and hot-swap bays (a bit of steel and plastic) can end up costing as much as the appliance above. DIY is substantially more expensive when you consider your time and the hassle of trying to work inside a microserver chassis. And you lose out on economy of scale since bare bones microservers aren't anywhere near as popular as bare bones gaming towers. The HP micro servers that have been discussed here several times have gone out of production, I think. In any case, they seem a bit dated now. Yeah. The N series are out, the Gen 8 series is in. And they look very tasty. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] NAS: buy vs. build
On 7/3/2015 2:47 PM, Tom Metro wrote: I'd ask if FreeNAS has been ported to any of them, but given the way FreeNAS seems to have moved towards requiring more enterprise hardware (ECC RAM, and lots of it), that seems unlikely. ECC RAM is a requirement for full ZFS integrity, and lots of it is for deduplication. The former is good to have in any kind of storage appliance or server, and putting the L2ARC on fast SSD reduces the dependency on the latter assuming you even want to use in-band dedup. If you do go the build route, there doesn't seem to be any way to approach the compact packaging of the appliances, or the pricing. Just the enclosure and hot-swap bays (a bit of steel and plastic) can end up costing as much as the appliance above. DIY is substantially more expensive when you consider your time and the hassle of trying to work inside a microserver chassis. And you lose out on economy of scale since bare bones microservers aren't anywhere near as popular as bare bones gaming towers. The HP micro servers that have been discussed here several times have gone out of production, I think. In any case, they seem a bit dated now. Yeah. The N series are out, the Gen 8 series is in. And they look very tasty. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
