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Iomega's New Unix (Optional) NAS Appliance

Posted by timothy on from the optional-factory-installed-options-optional dept.

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."

3 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Affordable for home users?? by billmaly · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Let's face it, home users are going to start needing additional space outside of their desktop PC's in a few years. Music, video, and information will eventually overflow their older PC's, and many people won't want to buy a new PC, yet they'll want 24 hour access to their data.

    Anyway...my point, and I do have one, is this: The company that can make an affordable ($200) NAS and make it SIMPLE for ANYONE to use, will succeed. THe cheapest out there (last time I checked) is @$400, and is a paltry 40GB. Sell 100 GB of storage for $200 or less, and people will buy it. I rolled my own NAS for not much more than the cost of a new HDD, but I have mad skillz that the average consumer doesn't (ability to scrounge and build a PC for close to nothing) :-).

  2. Hmmm... by NetJunkie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They are light on the details. What speed drives? What kind of internal controller? Anything in this box redundant or is all my storage gone when a power supply fails? Things like that are important, and they don't seem to mention it when I looked. I also question buying something like this from someone that makes nothing else even close.

    We use the Compaq TaskSmart 2400N NAS. Yes, it runs Win2K but it's rock solid and very good. It's built around a normal Compaq server so we already have spares. It can do up to 10TB in Cluster config. It uses all standard Compaq drives and parts which can be shared among other systems. Plus, you can manage it from Insight Manager. It also exports out to NFS for UNIX clients.

    It seems anyone that needed 1/2 TB on a NAS would already have other servers and would be better served going with their vendor's answer, assuming they had a good one.

  3. Snapshots and linux NAS by Yobgod+Ababua · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Raidzone (www.raidzone.com) also makes Linux-based NAS products. They're (for the obvious reasons) many times less expensive than NetApp, and easier to customize the configuration (just add new rpms) but aren't nearly as slick in a few regards.

    Snapshots are the biggest way in which NetApp is much better. Raidzone supports it's own "snapshots", but it implements them with a series of gigantic find-based cron scripts that can (on a large filesystem) bring your NAS to it's knees, and it maintains them more like incremental backups than NetApp's snapshot concept.

    Basically, each snapshot 'bucket' contains -only- files that have changed in the last time increment. If you delete a file that hasn't been changed in longer than the longest snapshot bucket, you lose. I'm not real thrilled with this, but don't have a better linux snapshot implementation without messing with the hardware or the kernel. Anyone know of anything more NetApp-like?

    [My opinions are my own and no one else's]