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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."
Mmm. Boy I hope these aren't susceptible to the click of death. Ah yes, the reliability of the zip disk..
air and light and time and space
Iomega's New Unix (Optional) NAS Appliance
:-(
But I was told that Unix is like a dark, moldy basement and I need to find a way out through Windows.
Slashdot v2.0
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.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
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.
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)
You're right -- GigE would be a natural option for this device.
That's probably why they included it.
http://www.iomega.com/nas/p410_sys.html
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
If the click of death happens in a data center and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
...all embedded and/or otherwise non-interacting technology: you plug it in, you get the storage. Who cares what OS is on? As long as it doesn't crash.
Which is the key criterion: doesn't crash.
I'd rather be locked in than locked out.
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.
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.
Those guys that have a buttload of dysfuntionnal 1GB JAZ drives?
....
:).
Those same guys that brought the BUZ video editing card that ended up with no good drivers and being just another expensive scsi card since the video part wasn't working half decently? (yeah I got one)
Those same people that had loads of trouble with their portable cdr drives?
Those same people selling the infamous Click! and never took off and left you with an expensive useless piece of
Hell, at the price they sell their stuff, I'd still go with my solution: IDE based, for performance, 3ware board with loads of drives. You get linux/windows support. Medium storage, good performance, Adaptec board with 4 drives, and POS version, well if you thought about getting NAS (which is a tad too expensive in my opinion) you don't need to consider a POS solution
Anyways, with their track record, I'd go with a Maxtor NAS or any other company before Iomega, and even if there would be only Iomega in that market, I'd make my own solution with off the shelf parts before trusting my data to them, Did that mistake too many times already.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
It can suffer from the click of death, AND the blue screen of death! Double bonus!
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
This is what is needed. Disk space is getting huge right now. Floppys don't work for backups anymore :)
Not many people can afford a DLT library to backup their 200GB of data.
The way it's looking, a hotswappable drive might be the cheapest backup solution in the long run...yikes!
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]
Yes indeed, there are absolutely no NAS solutions out there that don't lock you into a Microsoft-centric solution.
How'd this get +4?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
COD happened YEARS ago. Like OVER 5! I have had two Zip drives myself and can't say anything bad about them. One was the SLOW parallel port one that got knocked around cuz I took it back and forth to work. For the last two round of PC upgrades at work, all machines have had Zip drives installed. Zips in a user base af about 1500-3000 computers. I talk to the PC guys alot (I am mainframe/UNIX dude). I have heard NOTHING about Zip drive failures. Creative Labs Infra CD-ROM drives sucked and I heard about it too (especially since my boss had one...thing would suck the tray back in immedeately after ejecting it). Over 1500 drives in service with not much failing...it either means they just work, or they ain't using em. The Iomega COD think comes back every time Iomega releases a new thing. Yeah they made mistakes, but I think they have done well. Yeah, the clik disk/HipZip did suck, but only cuz it took them too long to develop it and by the time the 40 MB disks came out, CF cards were well above the 40 MB mark and cheaper then they once were. I just got a 128 MB CF card for my camera and it was only about 90 bucks (could have had it for 80, but I was lazy). Clik was just too little to late and Iomega ain't the only company to do this. This bash Iomega because of a problem 5 years ago is getting a little freaking old.
Gorkman
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.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"