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Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs?
hoggoth writes "As a common everyman who needs big, fast, reliable storage without a big budget, I have been following a number of emerging technologies and I think they have finally become usable in combination. Specifically, it appears to me that I can put together the little brother of a $50,000 NAS/SAN solution for under $3,000. Storage experts: please tell me why this is or isn't feasible." Read on for the details of this cheap storage solution.
Get a CoolerMaster Stacker enclosure like this one (just the hardware not the software) that can hold up to 12 SATA drives. Install OpenSolaris and create ZFS pools with RAID-Z for redundancy. Export some pools with Samba for use as a NAS. Export some pools with iSCSI for use as a SAN. Run it over Gigabit Ethernet. Fast, secure, reliable, easy to administer, and cheap. Usable from Windows, Mac, and Linux. As a bonus ZFS let's me create daily or hourly snapshots at almost no cost in disk space or time.
Total cost: 1.4 Terabytes: $2,000. 7.7 Terabytes: $4,200 (Just the cost of the enclosure and the drives). That's an order of magnitude less expensive than other solutions.
Add redundant power supplies, NIC cards, SATA cards, etc as your needs require.
Get a CoolerMaster Stacker enclosure like this one (just the hardware not the software) that can hold up to 12 SATA drives. Install OpenSolaris and create ZFS pools with RAID-Z for redundancy. Export some pools with Samba for use as a NAS. Export some pools with iSCSI for use as a SAN. Run it over Gigabit Ethernet. Fast, secure, reliable, easy to administer, and cheap. Usable from Windows, Mac, and Linux. As a bonus ZFS let's me create daily or hourly snapshots at almost no cost in disk space or time.
Total cost: 1.4 Terabytes: $2,000. 7.7 Terabytes: $4,200 (Just the cost of the enclosure and the drives). That's an order of magnitude less expensive than other solutions.
Add redundant power supplies, NIC cards, SATA cards, etc as your needs require.
I ripped most of my collection back in the OS9 pre-iPod iTunes days. Now that I have a kid and a house to take care of, I don't think I'll be re-ripping unless the computer dies. No judgement, just different priorities for me now. Peace
i can tell you they don't "throw out" the bad ones,
they sell them to the US government. then overcharge
to replace them, using of course more substandard gear
here at the Fed, we're so lazy we even outsource
wasting your tax dollars. i'm smiling, are you?
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
'Alan Cox [interview] suggested, "the real test of whether Sun were serious about ZFS being anywhere but Solaris is what they do to license it - they've patented everything they can, and made the code available only under licenses incompatible with other OS products. Their intent is quite clear, and quite sad. Compare it to what the old Sun company did with NFS, which is now a standard used everywhere."' http://kerneltrap.org/node/8066
free software, open standards, open file formats, no software patents.
Another n00b who thinks they can build a data-center capably 5-9's setup using cheap stuff they strung together. I love you guys. Let me take you on a tour of my email-server setup where I can randomly yank out fiber or even flip off one of the 3510FC arrays in my group, and watch it all keep purring along with 70,000 users NOT EVEN NOTICING. You simply don't understand that saving a few bucks on a lashed-together setup can be MUCH less important than having it "JUST WORK". Can your solution survive a mid-plane board or a controller or PSU going PHTHTHT! Can it survive an admin oops? Mine can. It's massively inefficient to do a RAID 5+1+0 as far as money, but it's VERY efficient as far as not ever having to say "yeah this service will be down for 3 days while we figure out how to unscramble things and restore the data." Professionalism means never having to say you're sorry. That's why there will always be work for guys like me. Because one day your "miraculously cheap" setup will go FIZZLE and people will look around for a home for their services that is first and foremost RELIABLE not cheap.