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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.
Porn jokes aside, what in the World does a common "everyman" need with that kind of storage?
I have a 40 gig OEM drive on this machine that I've had since 2003, and I still haven't approached the half way mark. And I run a couple of businesses.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I have experience with a number NAS solutions and if cost wasn't or reliability/throughput was paramount I would continue to purchase them (e.g., Netapp). Depending on the environment they are being installed in the (perceived) liability and additional complexity can be challenging to overcome.
With that said for places where rolling your own is an option I would keep your eye out for a good deal on drives and you will be able to build one much less expensive. I put together a new Myth backend with the following:
Antec Sonata II - $65 (rebate)
Asus M2N32-Vista addition (it's running Liux but the vista addition has an LIRC supported IR receiver) - $210
AMD 4200+ X2 - $96
2GB RAM - $55
Nvidia 7600 with HDMI out - $110
6 x 500GB Maxtor SATA II HDDs - $600
It's not RAID-Z but with a standard RAID-5 I have 2.5TB usable storage with HDTV output and ATA/iSCSI targets for $1136. Not bad and Linux SW RAID-5 write speed actually screams these days, with this setup I expect 200MB write throughput.
One word of caution with RAID-Z, although writes are extremely fast there is a performance issue around reads if they are small and random because there will be a lot of cache misses. Relatively speaking it's not that bad but something to kep in mind when looking at the workload you will be supporting.