Slashdot Mirror

We're looking at some "cheap" 10GbE stuff. QNAP TS-1279U-RP http://www.qnap.com/useng/index.php?lang=en-us&sn=862&c=355&sc=703&t=704&n=4802 Can purchase an add-on PCI-E card fairly easily and get a 100,000+ IOPS SAN/NAS combo for around $10k. Hard to beat the price/performance.

Link to the official QNAP forum: http://forum.qnap.com/viewforum.php?f=176
Many open bugs in core features, no support.

Here's a short list of NMP-1000 features, and how well they actually work on the latest firmware:
* Playback of video files encoded in H.264 - Almost no H.264 encoded files work. Most playback either choppy or not at all.
* Plays lots of digital music format, including FLAC, PCM, WMA, AC3, DTS, and WAV - Many WMA files don't play. Not all DTS encoding works.
* Supports almost all popular media formats files such as MKV(H.264), M2TS(Bluray) and AVI - MKV files rarely work.
* Apple movie trailers & Flickr, Youtube, Internet Radio, Shoutcast - Only Shoutcast works for about half of the listed channels, the rest doesn't.
* Bittorrent support - Maximum download speed ~13kb/s, cannot recover from paused downloads, crashes every few hours.
* NAS - Transfer speed less than a cheap NAS harddisk.

These are just the issues I encountered personally. Apparently playback is much worse depending on how you rip the files.

I haven't owned a Drobo so I can't comment on the quality or functionality. But QNAP and Synology are generally considered the leaders in the NAS market. SmallNetBuilder has pretty thorough coverage and benchmarks of your NAS options.

If you don't need a NAS, just some form of aggregate storage, non-networked alternatives are made by Mediasonic and Sans Digital. In my case I just needed something to throw my old drives in and power it on every couple weeks to backup my ZFS file server. So one of these connected via USB 3.0 or eSATA worked just fine.

I bought a QNAP NAS. It runs Linux, has media server stuff pre-installed and runs Linux. You can even install extra software if you like or just trow out all the software and install a "real OS" (Their words) like Debian.

http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=134 shows a list. Connecting my Linux machines goes over NFS. If I had a MAC, I could use AFP and for Windows there is Samba.

The standard possibilities are almost endless and as you can install extra software, they really are limited to your imagination and knowledge.

I have used a pair of QNAP TS-109s (older model) to do this - they can use whatever ports you want & they can be set to rsync on whatever schedule you like. According to this: http://www.qnap.com/images/products/comparison/Comparison_NAS.html the TS-112s will do everything you want, & newegg has them for $160, otherwise the TS-119P+ (can take 2.5" or 3.5" drives) is $250 or so. You need to add the drives. Their web interface is pretty nice, and mine are still going strong after 3+ years.

I've got one of these too, and it's been great. I've hacked it to run Debian Squeeze so I can mount it remotely using SSHFS -- older versions of the QNAP firmware only allowed you to SSH as root.

I have used a pair of QNAP TS-109s (older model) to do this - they can use whatever ports you want & they can be set to rsync on whatever schedule you like. According to this: http://www.qnap.com/images/products/comparison/Comparison_NAS.html the TS-112s will do everything you want, & newegg has them for $160, otherwise the TS-119P+ (can take 2.5" or 3.5" drives) is $250 or so. You need to add the drives. Their web interface is pretty nice, and mine are still going strong after 3+ years.

You can do everything using Linux for a lot cheaper but I believe what I have recommended will give you easier manageability if you are not a Linux expert. Plus it is all industry standard tech. I would recommend buying a couple of these for your storage and offsite backup (it has a lot of great features check the link) Qnap TS-559+ Turbo NAS http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=163 Then get 2 decent HP DL360's with lots of RAM. (check your warranty and decide how many hours you are willing to be down waiting for a part, VMware should make this not as much of an issue though since it is clustered) 1 less powerful HP server for a backup server with Veritas for backup software and a LTO4 backup library (size depends on how much data) Get 2 gigabit switches. Install VMware ESX on both servers and cluster them. Carve out some storage from your NAS and connect via iscsi to ESX. As far as directory administration goes I would use MS Active Directory 2x virtual domain controllers. As far as a Web server goes a simple virtual LAMP server should work great. If you have money left in your budget use another Windows server license for a print and file server otherwise you can use the NAS This will give you lots of room for growth. If you need another server you can bring up a virtual server in 10 min or less from a template. As far as the desktop software goes you will need to make sure everyone has a version of Windows that can join a domain. As far as email exchange can get messy for a novice so I would recommend just using Google Apps for email. Now you can even manage Blackberry phones and Google Android phones through it. For 20 people I don't think it is worth it to host your own email.

The only sensible recommendation one can make is getting a NAS like this one: http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=109

It's by far the fastest, most hassle-free and ecofriendly way of supplying any reasonable amount of storage. It does RAID5 and RAID6, iSCSI, ext4, 2x 1000MBit/s Ethernet, Ajax web-based management interface etc., so all the bases are covered well.

Virtualize.

Virtualize, but go one step further: get your virtual server hosted for you. For example Gandi is pretty sweet. I'm sure there must be similar services in the US. No more worries about that box running in the basement.

If you insist on having the hardware in your house, QNAP offers wonderful NAS boxes with Debian Lenny support.

Newer stuff to consider: qnap 419 (1.2 ghz arm), openRD client (1.2 ghz arm), sheevaplug (the walwart computer)

I just got myself a QNAP NAS (http://www.qnap.com/) on which all my systems backup. That NAS gets replicated to a USB disk from time to time, and I keep that disk offsite. My plan is to get rid of the USB disk and buy a second QNAP NAS to put at the remote site, and let them replicate over the internet. Reason: I can schedule that so it is not forgotten, and no more hassle of moving disks offsite.
Reason I went with QNAP: runs linux and is hackable out of the box :)

I'd say this baby can pull it off all by itself, if you equip it with 2TB drives:
http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=109

It also looks like it's got the horsepower to dish out all that data at acceptable speeds. ;)

Well, then it's time for you to take a closer look at this baby for example: http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=104

It's plenty fast for most tasks and can utilize a Gigabit link up to 30% in a RAID6 setup.

The older models (non-Pentium and non-Atom) really were slow. So slow in fact that one had to wonder why anybody would want to use anything other than JBOD, RAID0 or RAID1 on them. These new NAS boxes, however, have come a long way and are certainly suitable SMB/SOHO use.

QNAP runs linux. http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_software.asp?p_id=74

I bought a NSLU2 for fun last year -- ARM based, 266 mhz, 32 meg ram, 2 usb ports -- and promptly installed debian. Those specs are better than my desktop from 10 years ago, but I would prefer more ram and spu cycles. I've been looking at the QNAP 209/II (500mhz arm, 128/256 meg ram, 3 usb, 2 sata) and the the Thecus 2100 (600mhz arm, 128 meg ram (upgradable to 512), 3 usb, 2 sata). I'm not sure how well debian currently supports the qnap 209 though.

I'm now using a QNAP TS-109 (http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=79/) and love it. It's silent (no fans), low-power-consumption (about 14 watts max draw), has lots of built-in functionality managed through a web interface (including DLNA for media streaming to a PS3 or similar), and runs Linux...

Nice try Netgear, this company http://www.qnap.com/ already has some of the fastest Linux ARM based routers on the market. Tom's hardware recently reviewed their TS-209 Pro series which ranked as one of the fastest NAS's they've ever used. It also supports a huge variety of OSs and is probably closer to a micro server than a NAS.

QNAP's TS-209 Pro (The Pro adds NFS support!) is the funnest piece of hardware I've seen. RAID support with hot-swappable, automatic array rebuilding, plus all the server stuff:

File Server:
Backup Server:
3rd party backup software support: Arconics True Image, CA BrightStor ARCserver Backup, EMC Retrospect, Symantec
Backup Exec
Mirror Station:
Printer Server:
Disaster Recovery:
Web Server:
MySQL Server:
UPnP Media Server:
Support UPnP/ DLNA multimedia technology
iTunes Server:
File System:
EXT3 (Internal/ external HDD)
FAT (External HDD)
NTFS (External HDD, ready only)

It goes for about $400. It only draws 8watts when idle (and the drives are asleep).

I plan on getting 3 500GB hard drives for it, and use the auto-rebuild of the arrays to do backups. Just yank a drive out for offline storage, and plug in the 3rd drive and let it rebuild the array on the fly. 2 weeks later, rinse and repeat. Data is available during rebuilds too. ;)

Did I mention it runs linux, and you can get ipkg on it, so you can load almost any linux apps on it, like svn, etc?

I don't want an old computer pulling 100watts from the wall with freenas. This fits the bill!