Iomega's New Unix (Optional) NAS Appliance

Tora writes: "Zip disk maker Iomega has released a sexy new 1U Network Attached Storage server with an option for either Unix or Microsoft Windows as the OS. Their previous NAS offering was Windows-only; it is nice to see both OS options available, although they do not yet have pricing up for the Windows version."

Comments

Stay away from Iomega

[Neil Watson]

The click of death has already been mentioned but a few years ago I bought 10 Iomega IDE tape drives for some workstations (the network was P2P and I was inexperienced). I had a %50 failure rate on the drives. They would snap the tapes as soon as you loaded them. I would RMA the drives get new ones and some of those would do the same thing.

It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway

[b.foster]

One of my college buddies took a job at Iomega after graduation because it was an up-and-coming company - back in its heydey, most new PCs came with a shiny Zip100 drive next to the floppy, and times were good. Iomega used to be one of the tech world's few great innovators - and the Jaz concept was pure genius, especially compared with the primitive Bernoulli boxes that Jaz superceded.

Unfortunately, times have been tough for Iomega. They haven't posted a profit for several years. On a related note, they haven't come up with a decent new product for several years. Instead of innovating, they tried to get into the business of producing cheap, commodity devices (like tape drives and CD writers) that nobody was interested in buying. Coupled with the Click of Death problems, this new strategy backfired and sent Iomega into the red - where they have remained ever since.

And that brings me to my story: I talked to my buddy on the phone a few weeks ago, and he said that morale is low at Iomega. The company has been slashing jobs and pay every quarter, and he has had to lay off many of his subordinates. He said that the NAS idea is a last-ditch effort to squeeze profits out of a dying industry, and that Iomega's business plan is to sell the NAS devices at a loss (to stay competitive with the big guys) and to sell overpriced support contracts to try to stay in business. For his sake I hope it works out, but for all intents and purposes Iomega is dead. But nobody said that mormons have any business sense anyway, so I don't blame them.

/B.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I missing something here?

I always thought the point of NAS was that it used standards like TCP/IP and a web interface specifically so it wasn't linked to one specific OS. I'd expect any NAS device to be useable with any platform that supports a browser and IP networking, so just how was the older NAS device Windows-only? Was it using NetBIOS or something?

Re:Good.

[Wesley Felter]

Nope; NetApp implements snapshots using copy-on-write, so they consume less disk space, take effectively no time to create, and are atomic with respect to filesystem operations (so there won't be any problems if you're accessing the filesystem while the snapshot is in progress). Check out their File System Design for an NFS File Server Appliance white paper for the technical details if you're interested.

Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe

[Milican]

Better than that... you can get an Asus Terminator barebones system that *really* cuts costs...

• ASUS Terminator $199
  
• 2x 160GB Drives $400
  
• 512MB of RAM $130
  
• Athlon 1.4GHz (Tbird) $104
  

Ethernet is onboard :)

JOhn

Nothing unsual

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... My experience with Iomega would not lead me to trust them for online network data. Unreliable storage can cost a lot more than the amount you might save up front.

What's the big deal anyway? There are plenty of inexpensive *nix NAS devices; for example:
http://www.snapserver.com/

Re:Good.

[Libor Vanek]

Because I'm project manager/main programmer. Imagine - whole NAS was done just by 2 men/1.5 year and it has more features then any NAS on the market for 50-300%(!) less price...

I can't imagine how dificult (read expensive) must be doing (from programmers point of view - not from users!) some things in Windows (e.g. changing NAS IP addres by web browser, updating new kernel/OS services just by uploading 1 file etc...)

And that I don't speak about licencing (AFAIK it's forbidden to run email/WWW/SQL server on such a server - small companies don't want to have X servers for X services).

Re:NAS Devices in general

[tweek]

Hehe we basically did the same thing.

We needed a large NAS for storing disk images for our training room. Basically an image of each MS OS with each browser available for that OS.

Myself and one of the other admins, built an IDE raid solution using the 3ware ide card and a bunch of hard drives. We now have a hotswap 160GB hardware raid storage device running nothing but linux and samba.

Oh yeah, it has an Intel DualPort server nic using the Intel drivers to bond the interfaces. Plug that into the cisco switch and I have a nice 160GB NAS for around 2k.

I've also set the RAID's fs to reiserfs because I didn't want this fucker to have to fsck if for some odd reason it went down. (It's only happened once). I'm thinking that wasn't the best choice since all the files we're working with are at a minimum 1GB.