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Netgear Introduces Linux-Based NAS Devices
drewmoney writes "A LinuxDevices.com article introduces several of Netgear's Linux-based NAS devices, technology they acquired with the purchase of Infrant earlier this year. (Here is Netgear's product page.) There are models from 1.5 TB, at about $1,100, to 4 TB, topped by a 4-TB rack-mount version. They are geared towards the professional home user and small and medium businesses. The NAS devices come complete with the usual RAID features, file-system access, and a built in USB print server. All are controlled through a Web GUI and some even offer SSH access."
They are geared towards the professional home user...
Professional home user? How do I get such a job? I'd love to get paid for downloading porn, playing video games, and generally being lazy.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
No NFS = No purchase.
It doesn't matter if they run Linux internally, if all they basically do is samba, for Windows users (and Linux users who have adjusted to a Windows environment). I want NFS, POSIX attributes and remote fam. Which is perfectly feasible and even easy to implement on a Linux device. But the market is of course Windows users.
-b.
"Supporting NFS, rsync, SMB, ftp, and http file access, the ReadyNAS devices have a featureful Web GUI and, apparently new in the Netgear models, SSH access (although SSH may, as in the past, be limited to use as an rsync tunnel)."
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
I was assuming this would be ARM based (i love my linksys NSLU2!), but it uses the IT3107 which is apparently [warning: PDF] based on the SPARC core. If it wasn't so expensive, I'd buy one for that reason alone (ok, and because it runs linux).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
There have been dozens Linux-based NASs for years now. Infrant sells bare-bones ones, Buffalo Technology sells them, heck, D-Link sells a (crappy) little NAS with a linux kernel. How is this news? Or was this ad sponsored? :).
Reid
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
not sure what the thing linked to is, but it's NOT relevant and needs to be modded down as such.
Will they provide it ?
Are they GPL-compliant ?
Yes, they already have GPL code available for the older 3.0 release. 4.0 was just released this week, a GPL package should be available for it shortly.
I wondered about the article myself and checked how it had done on the firehose. It made it to red. Other articles on the main page only made it to orange. If you go by that, you would conclude that our fellow /. readers think this story is really newsworthy.
A more sinister interpretation might be that someone has found a way to game the firehose.
I agree with the other posters. This device doesn't seem that newsworthy. A quick check of my favorite online retailer shows that there are many such devices on the market.
Yep... here's the code....
ftp://downloads.netgear.com/files/GPL/readynas_gpl.zip
... does it let me share my own media files instead of thinking it knows better than I do what I want to do with my own stuff?
i am a soviet space shuttle
Well, maybe introduced as new models bundled with bigger drives, but haven't these been around for a bit even before NetGear bought out Infrant Technologies? http://infrant.com/products/products.php
Outside this frigid tumble-down shack, dry leaves before the wild winter hurricane fly. Here within, at the corner by the cold hearth rests an empty stool. A crutch without a master stands perched against the wall. These forlorn and lonely objects serve as mute reminders of their once owner, *BSD.
This crutch and vacant stool have become orphans, not unlike the now dead *BSD. No longer will *BSD hobble about on its cripple's crutch. Like the empty hearth, and the vacant stool, *BSD lies cold and still. *BSD's corpse, lifeless beneath frozen earth and December snows, will see no more Christmas cheer. No, there will be no Christmas ever again for *BSD, for *BSD is dead.
Goodbye, *BSD. The pain of life forever stilled, sleep for all eternity in that long winter's nap. Fade gently into Earth's frozen bosom where in dreams even cripples walk and blind men see.
Man, I hope they don't suck as much as the SNAP appliances. I've got about 2TB of NAS (and I use that term loosely) on SNAP server. I'm never buying another one. Crap reliability, crap features, crap adminstration.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
That's $0.73/GB for this Netgear product. Almost a year ago I built a 2.5 TB OpenSolaris fileserver using ZFS for $950, that's twice cheaper: $0.38/GB.
I understand Netgear market this product for endusers without the time or the ability to build and configure a NAS themselves, but this reminds me that some of us are privileged people, because we don't have to be victims of such horribly expensive proprietary gear... We have the choice to build it ourselves and save real, big bucks.
This also shows that the storage market really have room for more competitors. At a time where the raw cost of disks is $0.20/GB and where you can build storage servers for $0.36/GB (proof: I did it), the only explanation behind the high prices in the storage market is pure lack of competition. This is one of the reasons why Google build their servers themselves: they figured out all the "professional products" out there are overpriced.
That's a heck of a prosumer price, I think their new pricing is going to be a problem
I was getting ready to purchase an Infrant bare bones when I saw that they were bought out. I initially was happy with the idea that Netgear was picking them up - but they ended up raising prices. Maybe there are more niche users with that type of budget - but that at the price levels that they are offering, and the increases, I don't see it going to that large a market.
Consider you can get 4 320 GB 16 mb cache Seagate sata drives for $240 at Best Buy this week, adding a good nas and you're good to go. But at their entry prices...
Maybe we will see some generics going after their share. Another possibility is Thecus - that seems to be the better performance choice to compete against the new Netgears.
Good grief, can someone please explain to me what the fetish is with four drives in every single freakin NAS system on the planet? And every vendor gets the same thrill annoucing it as a "4TB" solution when only a complete moron would run these things as a single JBOD volume without any fault tolerance.
Why not five drives, guys? It's not like we are back in the late 90s when every motherboard had two IDE controllers supporting two devices. I routinely see motherboards now with five or six SATA ports. There are even splitters and repeaters that can change one SATA port into two. So why not break out and distinguish yourselfs with five drives so I can actually get a 4TB (3.8 actual *sigh*) solution AND a spare drive for the RAID set or even hotspare (if i'm feeling nervous).
Why not an even eight? How about a eSATA port so you could connect two NAS units together for expansion or redundancy? How about something like iSCSI and then let me chain as many NAS units together on a gigabit switch as I want?
I finally had to stop buying NAS units and get my hands dirty and build my own so I could actually break the REAL 3TB ceiling. I went with a SAS RAID card and an enclosure that supports 8 SATA drives out of the box. Down the road, I can get a SAS repeater and add a second 8-drive enclosure, or a third, or a fourth. Online volume expansion folds new drives in like butter.
But it's ugly as sin. It's a cheap Dell server ($329 w 3yr warranty!) whose only purpose in life is to house the SAS card connected to this ugly black metal monolith with two very tacky plastic drive enclosure racks. I don't mind sticking it in the closet of my house but I really can't stand the idea of trying to sell something like this to anyone.
But until I can pop down to Best Buy and buy something that looks decent, or is modular or stackable, I guess I'm stuck with whatever FrankenRAID I can piece together.
Eight drives, guys, how 'bout it?
-JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I sent this letter to NetGear a few days ago:
--cut here--
I like the fact you are using Linux in some of your products, as seen here:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3943657768.html
A product I and I am sure many other enthusiasts are interested in:
A line of inexpensive, small, software-reconfigurable "appliance" computers
that can be easily repurposed by reloading different software. I would like a
vendor who provides a supported "image" for various applications but who allows
custom applications to be loaded at will.
Such an appliance would have one or more of the following options:
- a drive bay or bays, for use as a NAS server
- USB port or ports for printers, scanners, drives, or other devices, for use
as a device server
- 3 or more ethernet ports that can be put on separate networks or used in a
one-IP-addressable-port/two bridged ports for use as firewall device
- wireless network or networks for use as a wireless router, access point, or
repeater
- CPUs and support chips of various price points and capabilities to match
various loads. A typical home/SOHO configured as a WAP+firewall+printer
sharer+NAS would likely need a medium-performance board, a home/SOHO configured
for one of those purposes would need a low-performance board, and a gamer would
need a high-performance board.
I would expect a "bare bones" setup that only did one function with light duty
to start well under $50, with high-end systems going for several hundred plus
the cost of high-end wireless transmitters, drives and cases for drives, etc.
The most important feature of this line would be customization:
A user who needs features supported by the hardware but not the firmware should
be free to customize the firmware to his heart's content. The only exceptions
would be for the brick-recovery emergency-boot firmware which should be
read-only. Individual physical subsystems such as the wireless transmitter,
USB hardware, ethernet hardware, SATA hardware, etc. should of course enforce
regulatory and standards compliance.
--cut here--
Please send your own letter to NetGear thanking them for choosing open-source. Better yet, buy products that use embedded open-source.
I'm just not so sure what's better about these NAS devices than either just running your own simple Linux server or a super-simple configuration. I'm not sure I want to trust my data to some proprietary RAIDed solution.
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What an idiot. I administer a few of these - they are used exclusively with Mac OS X clients using NFS, rsync, AFP, and webdav.
They don't even have CIFS turned on.
It really did start out as Linux and NFS, and then they added on Samba. The speed didn't work out for me with 50+ users, but it probably would be fine with 10 or so.
Before Netgear bought them Infrant was the best NAS out there. Great price for what you got and some excelent support & firmware updates that truly enhanced the product. I was hoping Netgear would change their direction and move towards the Infrant product ideals but, it seems NG is no better than Microsoft in this regard and has chosen to buy & cursh the competition.
One of my clients has the 4x750GB model in production for storage of backups. It runs Debian Woody on a Sparc and has 512M of memory. Shares can be mounted via NFS or CIFS. The device has gigE, but writes are limited to around 50-60 megabit and reads at around 100 megabit. The status of the disks, fans, power, and temperature can all be monitored via SNMP.
All in all, it's pretty good for the price point.
Netgear hasn't "introduced" anything. They are just re-branding the Infrant ReadyNAS products that have been on the market for at least a couple of years already. I'm not aware of any actual changes they've made to the devices themselves, so handing them complete credit for this is ridiculous.
The ReadyNAS NV+ is a pretty interesting unit, by the way. I have been looking at it a lot lately. It's one of only a handful of midrange consumer NAS devices that include features like Gigabit ethernet (so it's not slow as molasses) and support for not only SMB/CIFS and FTP but also the native Mac file sharing protocol, AFS 3.1. (Yes I'm perfectly aware that Mac OS X has no problem with SMB/CIFS, but it's a more pleasant experience to connect with AFS, and it also works with the Classic Mac OS. Believe it or not, some people do still use Mac OS 8/9 for various reasons.)
The ReadyNAS can be configured in several different disk modes from JBOD to RAID 0, 0+1, 5, to some proprietary mode Infrant calls X-RAID which supposedly uses disk space more efficiently than RAID 5 (when you're using 3 or 4 drives). The last big positive I can think of at the moment is that it actually supports a list of UPSes so your home or office file/backup server will theoretically shut itself down safely rather than crashing hard when the UPS battery runs down after the power has been off for an hour in the middle of the night. How about that.
Unfortunately the ReadyNAS, like all the other NAS (and non-NAS) multi-drive RAID-type storage devices fails to impress me in one regard. The hardware itself that controls the drives is still a scary single point of failure. I may be protecting myself from a drive failure, but if the hardware fails you lose everything anyway! The chances of the important hardware failing is always greater than zero, and the probability that you will somehow be able to recover your data by sticking the drives into another identical device is much, much lower than 100%. So to be reasonably sure that you won't lose your entire array you need to get at least TWO of these expensive devices and keep them synchronized. This is tantamount to failure in my book.
So in the end I have kind of written off all these devices and I'm waiting for widespread ZFS support in Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, et al. It's coming soon (except for Windows, I don't hold out much hope for Windows ZFS support, third-party or otherwise). When that happens it will be possible to take some generic PC hardware and create a ZFS raidz2 array that can handle losing two drives without failing to protect the data, then if that PC hardware fails you can take that ZFS raidz2 array and hook it up to some other generic PC hardware and simply do a "zpool import" and go on about your business. No insanity like losing an entire RAID array because of some stupid little glitch in the RAID hardware. Eff-you-see-kay THAT, buddy.
Unless I am completely misunderstanding the capabilities of ZFS and raidz/raidz2, it would seem that we are currently on the threshold of the first and only truly resilient data storage method that won't cost a king's ransom to implement. Any supported generic PC hardware (cheap) with Gigabit ethernet, SATA and at least 1GB of RAM will be able to become a file server that will outstrip by a country mile the performance and reliability of all these regular RAID-based NAS devices that almost across the board have abysmal data transfer speeds. Even the very nice Netgear/Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ will be completely obsolete unless they jump on the ZFS bandwagon.
Mark my words. The entire data storage industry will be changing very soon. Most folks here don't seem to see it yet but I think ZFS is going to be big. Like, iPod big, or iPhone big. Everybody scoffed at those devices at first. Well, they aren't scoffing now. I think widespread ZFS support is going to do the same sort of thing. It seems like just another filesystem at first, but it ain't.
1)
This is the old Infrant NV+
It has been out for about 2 years in its current form.
This is absolutely nothing new.
Infrant just got bought by NetGear and hence the PR push.
New brand, same old, same old device.
2)
The minor tweak is the new 4.0 firmware, whose main plus is breaking the old 3TB limit.
Other than that, same hardware.
3)
When NetGear bought Infrant they raised the price of the drives from $600 (diskless) to $800 (diskless
And made it tougher to get diskless systems.
You'll want to add your own drives as you'll notice their mark-up on the drives is high.
Adding drives is a main selling point of the NV+ with its RAID-X system
4)
Other than a PR paper launch of an old product, the NV+ is pretty nice.
It does a lot of things easily, without a lot of effort.
RAID-X is cool, and the main selling point. You can dynamically add more drives to the RAID array, and it will automatically resize; both as drives are added and once all drives can support higher sizes (e.g. replace 4 0.5TB drives with 1TB drives your RAID auto-resizes to 2TB to 4TB).
The price is an issue, especially if you buy it with disks included.
Also, the NV+ is long in the tooth and really needs a model with >4 disks (ala the Norco DS-520; 5 SATA, 3 eSATA, 4 USB).
Then maybe you can shed some light --the first thing I look for, before I even look at the price tag-- is the noise level, because I do not want to listen to another set of fans in my home office. The specs don't say. Can you?
"Good news, everyone!"
With ZFS you can also dynamically expand your pool by replacing drives one-by-one with larger ones, no matter what the current pool configuration is: combination of stripes, mirrors, raidz, raidz2. You can also expand a pool by adding a new "vdev" to it. A vdev can be a single drive or a N-drive mirror/raidz/raidz2. There is one thing you can't do (yet): dynamically reconfigure a N-drive raidz/raidz2 vdev to a (N+1)-drive vdev.
Also, RAID-X doesn't seem to implement snapshots, quotas, reservations, compression, end-to-end checksumming, etc. I fail to see how RAID-X would interest ZFS users, did I miss something ?
I recently threw two SATA drives into an old Shuttle PC I had laying around and installed FreeNAS on a 128MB CompactFlash card. So far I'm quite impressed. And while I'm running it strictly as a JBOD right now, it has the capability for (software) RAID levels 0-5. I haven't delved into it too much, but it may support some hardware RAID cards. Can't beat it if you have an old PC laying about.
I think you need one of these to install in that old beige box or if you crave a complete solution, one of these.
And let's not forget openfiler, since we're mentioning free NAS solutions. It's not lightweight, but it looks pretty cool.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Pretty expensive for a box that just holds a couple of hard drives, huh?
Then raised the prices by hundreds of dollars. For the exact same hardware.
I have two of the infrant barebones boxes. They are good. The barebones model is no longer offered.
The media sharing only seem to work with a few players. I am using it with a Buffalo media link, and that seems to work well. I can also browse to the media share with firefox on a Linux box and get it to work there too. But my PS3 doesn't see it. I am able to easily view videos and perform file sharing from multiple computers and media players at the same time.
I manually upgraded the RAM to 1GB, and threw in four 750 GB drives into both of them. It is important to use only hardware off the list of tested hardware. Otherwise you are hit and miss on the system working.
After they were configured each box had 2TB of usable space. I installed the beta upgrade and have a login now to the fully configurable debian based system.
To build the 3TB system I have with the 1GB of memory I paid $1700. A comparable system from Netgear is $2199.00 - $2399.95. And that is with only 256MB of RAM.
http://www.freenas.org/ - FreeBSD based, a pleasure to install, configure and use.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
Take a look at the Thecus N2100. For $360 or less it appears to have similar capabilities.
Comments please?
grad school
Talk about a dead-end investment.
Who in their right mind would sink money into a Linux NAS solution, when there's (Open)Solaris with kernel-implemented CIFS, NFS V4, and ZFS?
Insane.
Checkout www.freenas.org the live CD runs from CD, with configuration in an XML on floppy or USB flash and all your disk interfaces (aside from the CD drive, sorry) are just that - for disks.
There are a couple of limitations, but hey, get your hands dirty and help fix them!
Having Linux etc. in a NAS is nice - but the features ZFS offers (almost no-cost snapshots, clones, RAID-levels, volume-expansion etc.pp - see the various articles on Wikipedia, OpenSolaris, Sun.com and solarisinternals, if you have been living under a rock for the past years) will *kill* every other filesystem (or push it back into a niche).
It might also kill NetApp at the same time.
OpenSolaris even has an iSCSI-Target.
Yes, it needs a lot of RAM and a 64 Bit CPU to be useful - but in return, you get what was previously only available from NetApp , when you paid 6-figure sums.
Use of Linux will probably be relegated to little "NASlets" that for some reason can't or don't need to run ZFS/Solaris.
Currently, both the license and arguing about the design seem to prevent the use of ZFS with Linux.....
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
That this little Netgear SoHo storage box isn't enterprise grade?
That should have been clear to most people but then you ain't most people are you.
By the way, how you coming with that fiber backbone in your mom's basement?
Nice try Netgear, this company http://www.qnap.com/ already has some of the fastest Linux ARM based routers on the market. Tom's hardware recently reviewed their TS-209 Pro series which ranked as one of the fastest NAS's they've ever used. It also supports a huge variety of OSs and is probably closer to a micro server than a NAS.
2-TB TeraStations sell for at least $760... Which illustrates my point.
I thought Linux was supposed to be "free".... but the units they're talking about cost as much as any other with an embedded proprietary OS.
At least with Linux you could hack together a network connected lump of 1.5TB for less than $1100 on your own.
Thanks Netgear...
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
The D-Link firmware is buggy as hell, still, even after the thing has been out commercially for over a year.
Don't worry, D-Link will stop producing buggy firmware for your hardware model soon enough.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Okay, is Slashdot THIS desperate for news?
/. Their comment, all the decent news is old and too much politics.
:-(
So I've gotten used to Slashdot moving from first delivery of news to a couple of weeks behind. But this is just blithering ridiculous...
Netgear's acquisition of Infrant and sale of ReadyNAS is nearly 6 month old news.
I bought one way back in August. Came with a free Wii, which took 3 months to arrive and which I then turned around and sold for $400 on ebay, and then in turn bought an Xbox360...
Look, posting articles this late as news just makes Slashdot look stupid. Already I am finding more and more of my friends are no longer reading
I think I might be joining them soon...
No, really, you don't.
Even if you think you do.
Companies making these devices know this to be true for 99% of home users (I would say 100%, but hey, you may actually need 3TB), and make sensible compromises about their offerings.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.