Jill has covered a lot of good points for NAS servers and file servers
in general. But ill add a few points.
Rowling, Jill wrote:
We installed a NAS a couple of years ago, and for the most part it has been
relatively trouble-free.
Some problems which came up:
- Nonstandard Windows 2000 system surprised some of the Windows systems
administrators as some tools were not present which they were used to.
they will strip 2000 and do funny things. now they are using 2003
appliance edition. i found that if i terminal serviced in (on
headless) or logged in (on headed) i was just able to use the same
normal methods of adding things - such as intel nic teaming...
which i later found buried in the dell menus anyway.
but ive been able to get WUS going and others with regedit etc.
a mid range windows admin will find them disorienting if they are
really customised. any high end admin should have no problems at
all (i guess that toots my own horn. but im also the sort that really
doesnt seem much difference between linux distributions)
- Overly-trusting NFS system. If I was root on Unix box A, then I
automatically became admin on the NAS. This was not particularly secure so
we disabled it and went back to CIFS only. You might enquire about this
because later versions of NAS may be a bit more secure now. I think the NASs
that use Services for Unix may be OK as you just specify whether root on one
is admin on the other (or not).
thats something worth looking into.
- Check how expandable the disk array is, and subscribe to the
manufacturer's end-of-life list. We got caught out with an expandable system
but it would only work with the same brand arrays, and they were EOLd about
a year after we bought it.
yes raid is like that. its a pain. be aware of the life cycle of
the manufacturers products. having said that, the dell (badged adaptec
and badged mylex?) was happy to rebuild mirrors onto larger replacements
but you only got the first 18 gigs of space (in that case), you could
partition and use the rest of the space though.
- Users always fill up file systems unless they are micro-managed. We
partitioned our NAS with the main array being one phy partition, multiple
logical ones (Win shares). The net result was some users tended to hog the
array and others complained about no space. The better option is to
virtualise the space: ask your provider if they can do this. It might cost a
bit extra though.
windows quotas are quite nice. youll need to plan your partitioning
around them as its on a per partition basis and it gets messy if you
have group shares. but for simple home dirs it works great and
comes with the OS (2000+)
- In a large org, users come and go. This means files and sometimes great
gobs of stuff get orphaned, and Groups get unmanaged. You really need to
have eye on this, maybe get some procedures written down that everyone
follows.
As for large files, they should be OK. They will just take a while to open.
For large directories, I have seen one with over 16000 entries in it. It
takes about 40 seconds to view the directory.
good points for fs in general
Do take out a service contract on a NAS because a lot more people are
relying on it being available compared with desktop computers, and if it
breaks you need it up quickly.
Make sure you can restore user's file when they accidentally delete them, so
you will need some backup/restore system.
i would run regular backups and yes, have a support contract. it will
save you a lot of time and hassle. better their time than yours!
you might consider something like 'yesterday' read only folders and
then weekly backups.
Dean
Cheers,
Jill.
-----Original Message-----
From: Rajnish [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, 5 August 2005 12:28 PM
To: slug@slug.org.au
Subject: [SLUG] Network Attached Storage (NAS)
All,
I would like to get your esteemed opinion on a number of queries
concerning NAS. But first a background - our LAN accomodates a number of
diff OSes, including Solaris, Linux, Win2K and WinXP.
We would like to attach NAS device(s) on the LAN, and be able to access
storage space from all the above OSes. In particular, it is important that
NAS devices support NFS - to enable Un*x boxes to mount the space.
The space is to be used both as permanent storage as well as "overflow"
workspaces for our developers.
Questions:
1) Is NAS a suitable solution for such an environment ? If a case is to be
made for/against it, what are the ups and downs ?
2) More importantly, what are your experiences with dealing with these
devices ? Do they support NFS ?
3) Your experiences with speed and reliability ? We have particularly
large files (200MB-2GB) to deal with and compiles includes a large number of
files.
Any tips, suggestions, references will be appreciated.
Thanking you all in anticipation. Please reply to NG for future reference.
--
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