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Snap Appliance Snap Server 1100 NAS Device
~*77*~ writes "While taking up considerably less space than a shoebox, this little device seamlessly allows users to add additional storage to any network in less than five minutes. Today we review the Snap Appliance 80GB Snap Server 1100. This compact NAS (network attached storage) device has many great features including: 5 minute installation, a compact web and ftp server, or simply a network share. Most importantly it works in a network mixed with Windows, Netware, UNIX, Linux, and Macintosh machines... "
I work with a 1.2T SNAP daily ... these things are great. Reliable, scalable and robust.
KARMA TAG! You're it.
we use a snap server at my work (sorry I don't remember which model off hand) but it was very easy to setup. It runs a custom version of liunx, and you can ssh to it. We already have a samba server but needed more space for a few people. So I edited the snap's smb.conf and added passwd server = archives1 and used the snap server's adduser script to create the users we needed, and the users use \\snapserver\username in windows to access their home directories to store more files. They use their username and passwd from archives1, so I didn't have to add them to samba on the snap server. very cool
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Their older produdcts didnt do this.. and made it a royal pain to manage.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think we need to see more of this sort of thing. Not only do network drives allow for easy transferring of data, but having a drive that can be easily moved from network to network has vast possibilities. Albeit, many of those possibilities lie in the realm of warez...
http://www.snapappliance.com/ is the company's website -- one might get more info out of it than the listed source. I visited as soon as the link went up and it was a slow load.
I work with several NAS appliances daily and the easiest to administrate is clearly the SNAP servers. Although we use Dell branded ones that work just as well with unix/novell/linux/mac/windows so the product discussed isn't very "unique" so to say. And it's been in the market for quite some time...
But I guess it's good for those that havn't discovered the advantages with snap's yet.
Followup:
I guess it does provide a ftp/web server, but I think I could get a suitable box set up in an hour with all those things with at least triple the disk space.
Actually it's running GuardianOS which seems to be a custom version of the BSD kernel. Unfortunately it only really supports whatever the OS image you download from them supports. Some of the fancier more expensive models you can access through SSH and theoretically install software on, but that's it.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
You miss the point. These aren't for transporting large amounts of data from one place to another (though that ceritanly is one use for them). They are meant to be put in place to add storage to a network where it's needed instead of taking down a file server. Of course, there are situations where even this isn't as good an option as just adding more space to a server, but, that's neither here nor there..
bork bork bork!
None of my geek friends use "robust," so it's not a normalpersonspeak word.
Could you please show me the dictionary where you found "marketingspeak," "geekspeak," and "normalpersonspeak"?
Eric S. Raymond's "dictionaries" don't count, by the way.
My only experience with this is bad - SNAP uses two regular IDE drives, in RAID-0... A customer bought one, and one of the drives died.. I suggest a new slogan:
"Twice the storage, half the reliability!"
You don't understand the target market for this thing. It's designed to be a zero-administration storage solution for small office/workgroup situations. You plug it in and forget it exists; NOT something you can do with even a Linux server. It also does support NetWare/NT/AD for handling logins. You're thinking about an Enterprise level solution for a Workgroup problem.
Case in point - We have a remote office that's about ten miles or so outside of city limits. Way out in the boonies. There's about 6-8 users there at any time, max, and until just recently they had no connectivity back to City Hall. (Recently got Cable Modem VPN running...) How would adding a HD to our fileserver in City Hall help them? It wouldn't. Would it make sense to buy a proper server for a six person workgroup? Hell no. So we stick a SNAP server on their network. Then we forget about it. 80GB of storage is more than they'll ever need. We have quite a few offices like that one, with SNAP servers of varying sizes (the guys doing a lot of AutoCAD need a bit more than 80GB) and they're all better served by having a little SNAP in their wiring closet than us setting up a server that requires maintenance.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Actually the 2200s and up do support RAID-5. As well as plain striping or mirroring. What's special about it is that it's a fire and forget zero administration solution for a small workgroup scenario. They also come with a great warranty, wherein I had a server replaced free of charge even though its warrant was expired (as mentioned in above post).
The whole idea is you're paying for a solution you can install and forget about. Can't say the same about full blown fileservers.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
We've bought a 1TB SnapApplicance and it sucks. UPS doesn't work, our backup system doesn't work (absolutely no logs or error messages, impossible to debug), and we've had a total of 3 hard drive failures so far _this_ year. We don't dare to use it, so we keep using our p-pro no-brand home-built server, which have been working for 3 years... and are taking the necessary steps to get our money back. Oh, and by the way, the support people suck too: Quite friendly, nice to talk to, and they know slightly more about this computer stuff than my grand ma. Oh, and in addition to incomplete logs: If you reboot your system: Poof. No logs. Which is quite inconvenient, to say the least.
.asif
You're paying that $300 for a motherboard, PSU, memory, NIC, CPU, R&D and labour. It's actually a great deal.
I have the Snap 2200 model running on my Windows network at work.
It is more or less a pair of IDE hard drives with a hardware RAID. You can run them mirrored for half the space (aka 240G becomes a mirrored 120G) or as a single drive for full space.
The SNAPs can interface directly to a windows domain controller for user login security. Very slick, took about 20 minutes to get it up and running from zero knowledge.
This is the second SNAP device we have had, the first was a 40gig model a few years back. THis is also the second SNAP i've had fail. The first lasted two years before the cooling fan on the CPU inside failed and caused the device to lock up under any kind of normal load. Since the unit was out of warranty and the fan was too small to find a "home brew" solution we opted to upgrade. I have since removed the drives from the old device and passed them down to desktop machines.
My current SNAP (the 2200) just this week lost the secondary mirror disk. The unit has only been in use for 5 months and has seen very little usage day to day. Thankfully I was running in mirror mode (and had tape backups) so no data was lost. The unit locked up when the drive failed but after a reboot discovered its error and reported the failed disk on the admin info screen. I simply FTPed the data off the remaining drive and called their tech support number.
Snap's warranty service seems well structured, after 10 minutes on the phone and sending the consultant a couple log files I was issued an RMA number and instructed to send the unit back, once received they would ship another. If I needed immeadiate replacement I could give them a CC# and they would ship that day.
The only bad part about this is that I had thrown the box away...Keep the box, they require 2 inches of solid foam, or 3 inches of bubble wrap else you void the warranty...no peanuts.
SO if you are planning on either the 1100 or larger keep the box, run in mirror mode, and keep the units well cooled.
I like snaps and will continue to use them, I feel as though I may have just found the 1 in 5000 bad drives.
Apple free since 1990!
I was looking at DIY something like this (since I am competent in building BSD/Linux systems from scratch):
- 3.5' IDE based HDD
- 3.5' or smaller form factor embedded linux/bsd based pc
- power supply
There seem to be a number of 3.5' ff embedded pc's, something like no less than 100-200mhz seemed ideal: just needs 16-32mb ram, onboard 100mb NIC and a serial port - anything else is a waste of money. Lots of taiwanese manufacturers making these. Some have inbuild 16mb SDRAM and inbuild CF or at least PCMCIA (for a CF adapter) to put the boot image on. The current drain on these systems I've seen a few quoted at ~4W, average seems to be 5-10W. Low power
Would be very interesting to hear anyone else who has done something like this, esp. re prices and suppliers, and appropriate CPU type/speed required to service ATA-100/133 + 100MB NIC, and whether 16mb SDRAM suitable.
Something like this I guessed would set me back no more than ~UK120GBP (incl. ~50-60 for 160gb HDD).
Mini-itx Motherboard (Fanless, Very Small) ~$115
80GB HardDrive $70
Gigabit NIC* $25
Pretty Case $100
Linux Free*
Total ~280-305
*Optional
^Requires Initial Work (Maybe there is a handy Distro for this type of thing I don't know?)
BTW Newegg.com says they will carry mini-itx soon so prices may get much better in the US.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
They seem to use normal IDE drives, so they WILL eventually fail.
All disk drives will eventually fail, whether they're IDE/ATA, SCSI or Fibre Channel. With IDE, you lose tagged command queueing, seek performance generally isn't as good (8-9ms vs 4-5ms for the latter disks), and you don't get 15k RPM spindle speeds (7200-10k is the maximum for IDE).
But, for a single-disk unit such as the SNAP server, those factors aren't all that important.
Download the SME server linux distribution from www.contribs.org. Install on a pc with 1 or 2 drives (2 must be mirrors). Decide if you also want an internet firewall/nat gateway on the same box. Add users with the web interface. Done.