SoHo NAS With Good Network Throughput?

An anonymous reader writes "I work at a small business where we need to move around large datasets regularly (move onto test machine, test, move onto NAS for storage, move back to test machine, lather-rinse-repeat). The network is mostly OS X and Linux with one Windows machine (for compatibility testing). The size of our datasets is typically in the multiple GB, so network speed is as important as storage size. I'm looking for a preferably off-the shelf solution that can handle a significant portion of a GigE; maxing out at 6MB is useless. I've been looking at SoHo NAS's that support RAID such as Drobo, NetGear (formerly Infrant), and BuffaloTech (who unfortunately doesn't even list whether they support OS X). They all claim they come with a GigE interface, but what sort of network throughput can they really sustain? Most of the numbers I can find on the websites only talk about drive throughput, not network, so I'm hoping some of you with real-world experience can shed some light here."

Comments

Cmon people...

[Creepy Crawler]

You might as well build it yourself.

Go get a lowbie Core2, mobo, good amount of ram, and 4 1TB disks. Install Ubuntu on them with LVM and encryption. Run the hardening packages, install Samba, install NFS, and install Webmin.

You now have a 100% controlled NAS that you built. You can also duplicate it and use DRBD, which I can guarantee that NO SOHO hardware comes near. You also can put WINE on there and Ming on your windows machines for remote-Windows programs... The ideas are endless.

Re:Cmon people...

[swillden]

Your network connection is the limiting factor here. On large sequential reads, modern SATA drives with a mobo's onboard controller can easily maintain the 100MB/s or so it takes to max out your gigE connection.

I second this.

A good way to test your network connection is with netcat and pv. Both are packaged by all major Linux distos.

On one machine run "nc -ulp 5000 > /dev/null". This sets up a UDP listener on port 5000 and directs anything that is sent to it to /dev/null. Use UDP for this to avoid the overhead of TCP.

On the other machine, run "pv < /dev/zero | nc -ulistenerhost 5000", where "listenerhost" is the hostname or IP address of the listening machine. That will fire an unending stream of zero-filled packets across the network to the listener, and pv will print out an ongoing report on the speed at which the zeros are flowing.

Let it run for a while and watch the performance. If the numbers you're getting aren't over 100 MB/s -- and they often won't be, on a typical Gig-E network -- then don't worry about disk performance until you get that issue fixed. The theoretical limit on a Gig-E network is around 119 MBps.

Do the same thing without the "-u" options to test TCP performance. It'll be lower, but should still be knocking on 100 MBps. To get it closer to the UDP performance, you may want to look into turning on jumbo frames.

pv is also highly useful for testing disk performance, if you're building your own NAS (highly recommmended -- a Linux box with 3-4 10K RPM SATA drives configured as software RAID0 array will generally kick the ass of anything other than very high end stuff. It's nearly always better than hardware RAID0, too).

Re:You could roll your own.

[nhtshot]

My situation is similar to yours. I bought and tested several off the shelf solutions and was continuously disappointed.

My solution was an off the shelf AMD PC filled with HDD's and linux software raid.

It's MUCH Faster (90MB/Sec) then any of the NAS solutions I tested.

With Christmas specials abounding right now, HDD's are cheap. Use independent controllers for each port and a reasonable CPU. Also make sure that the GIGe interface is PCI-E.

Network won't be your bottleneck.

[m0e]

Disk will always be. Since disk is your slowest spot you will always be disk I/O bound. So in effect there's no real reason to worry about network throughput from the NIC. NICs are efficient enough these days to just about never get bogged down. What you would want to look at for the network side would be your physical topology -- make sure you have a nice switch with nice backplane throughput.

About disks:

Your average fibre channel drive will top out at 300 IO/s because few people sell drives that can write any faster to the spindle (cost prohibitive for several reasons). Cache helps this out greatly. SATA is slightly slower at between 240-270 IO/s depending on manufacturer and type.

Your throughput will depend totally upon what type of IO is hitting your NAS and how you have it all configured (RAID type, cache size, etc). If you have a lot of random IO, your total throughput will be low once you've saturated your cache. Reads will always be worse than writes even though prefetching helps.

If you're working with multi-gigabyte datasets, you'll want to increase the number of spindles (ie number of disks) to as high as you can go within your budget and make sure you have gobs of cache. If you decide to RAID it, which type you use will depend on how much integrity you need (we use a lot of RAID 10 with lots of spindles for many of our databases). That will speed you up significantly more than worrying about the NICs throughput. don't worry about that until you start topping a significant portion of your bandwidth -- for example, say 60MB/sec sustained over the wire.

This doesn't get fun until you start having to architect petabytes worth of disk. ;)

Already been extensively discussed...

[kwabbles]

For example:

Best home network NAS?
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/21/141244&from=rss

What NAS to buy?
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/30/1411229

Building a Fully Encrypted NAS On OpenBSD
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/16/002203

Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs?
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/30/0135218

What the hell? Is this the new quarterly NAS discussion?