I'll second that - I have a QNAP TS-509 with 5 x 2Tb drives, and I have nothing but good things to say about it. Performance is excellent - transfers to/from it routinely hit about 80-90% utilisation on my Gbit LAN without any fuss.
If/when the capacity of 5 drives is no longer enough for me, I strongly suspect I will either add a second one or upgrade to one of the 8-drive models.
I bought one of these too, as a cheap NAS solution for some backups and such - and I thought it was a complete pile of garbage. Functionally it was quite OK (once you jump through the necessary hoops to trick it into firing up SSH), but the thing that absolutely killed it for me was speed.
It's hard to describe how pathetically slow the transfer rates were. I tried numerous transfer methods: scp/sftp, rsync (over rsh and ssh), SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP. The best speeds I got were FTP, and that was all of about 15 Mbit/s, with CPU pegged at 100% for entire transfer. Slowest was SFTP (presumably due to the encryption overhead), at about 4 Mbit/s. Why they bothered putting a Gigabit NIC in it I do not know. Since I wanted it mainly for backups of other machines (i.e. a couple of hundred Gb of fulls and several Gb of incrementals), it wasn't even remotely up to the task.
It's quite noisy for its size too - OK when idling, but the fan rate (and corresponding noise) jumps up whenever you do anything significant with it.
I ended up pulling the drives out and putting them in another PC (they are perfectly normal WD SATA drives), and throwing the rest away.
From my experience, the best way to earn the respect of your customers/users is to consistently deliver good service. Do all the behind-the-scenes hard yards to ensure the systems you look after are stable, reliable, and performing well (even though the users never have any visibility of this, or appreciate just how much work it takes to do). When something does go wrong - when, not if - even if it is not your fault, be professional, polite, friendly, and above all keep the user(s) informed of progress (particularly if it takes a long time to solve the problem). If the users actually know you are working hard on solving their issues, they generally appreciate it even if they don't have a clue what you are actually doing.
Remember users are not IT people, and don't understand the complexities of IT systems. Even when a problem is entirely their fault (which is unfortunately frequent), try to explain to them in clear layman's terms the correct way to do whatever they are trying to do. Even if it is a case of colossal stupidity on their part, reserve your scorn and laughter for when you relay the story to your other IT colleagues, and not when talking to the user.
If all else fails, remember that being respected by everyone isn't a job necessity, nor is it always possible. It's very unlikely you will be able to please everyone all the time. In my job, I generally have a choice between having the users hate us (because we've allowed unstable/unreliable systems through to production), or having project managers hate us (because we won't allow their shoddy rushed garbage through in order to meet their poorly planned deadlines). I opt for the latter - my job is to provide services to the end users, not to make sure project managers get their bonuses.
Australia is *not* part of the UK. It is a member of the Commonwealth - as are pretty much all of the former British colonies. It is no more a part of the UK than Canada is.
I don't have any OSX clients, sorry, or much experience with OSX in general. But the NAS itself is basically just a Linux box (it runs BusyBox), and uses ext3 filesystems and Samba/NFS. So I presume that OSX clients would work just as well (or badly, if that is the case) as they would with any similar Linux setup.
I don't run a great deal of the out-of-the-box software on mine, as I already have a couple of Linux servers for those sorts of duties. I mainly use mine for backups, music/video storage for an HTPC, and iSCSI targets for a bunch of VMware machines. But you can run pretty much whatever you want on it - there's a package management system built in which makes it easy to install a whole truckload of third-party prepackaged software (check out http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/ts509/cross/stable/), or you can just use that to install gcc and then compile anything else yourself.
I bought one of these a few months ago, and stuck 5 x 1Tb drives in it. It's certainly not the cheapest solution, but I don't regret it for a minute - it's fast (I get pretty similar speeds to those reported in the SmallNetBuilder review), quiet (can just barely hear the fan, and there is very little drive noise), reliable, easy to set up and use, and the fact that I can simply SSH into it and install/run whatever I like on there is a huge bonus. It has dual Gbit NICs and supports Samba, NFS and iSCSI, and a whole truckload of other features.
I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something like this.
I also have invented a process for creating a rock inside of a computer, one that all of the people in the world could artificially engrave in a tombstone-style text whatever they wish. If built, this rock would enable all people on Earth to store one paragraph or more worth of information that would be permanently stored on the computer. The information stored would outlive the person whom engraved the rock because the rock would be of a 0.8 micron process with 500,000 transistors in the space of a 486 Central Processing Unit. A 486 Central Processing Unit actually has over 800,000 transistors. My design would be more reliable than a 486. Some people may think that a 0.8 micron process is too slow - this is incorrect if it is a 1024 bit or higher processor, then it could do more in increased volume than a smaller processor. The processor would last many hundreds of years and this is why the space shuttle uses similar technology - where failure is not an option. The information engraved in the rock which is purple and blue and marble-like and is black in some areas where the operating system blocks out information that a person may chose to remove from the rock. The information people place on the rock is permanent. Data is stored in the style of something similar to a Nintendo video game cartridge which is Read Only Memory (ROM) and will almost certainly last many lifetimes before failure. The rock is rectangular and information within it could be searched through or zoomed in and out of viewing range. The rock would cost based on the price of data storage media. For instance: an 80 GigaByte hard disk can hold 80 billion characters of information - this would give every single person on Earth approximately 13 characters of information on the rock for about $50 worth of failure prone storage like a personal computer hard disk. The design intentions are to make the rock outlast 10's of lifetimes before repair, to be redundant in all ways and last for eternity. The rock is for love letters, poems, eulogies and anything at all. This rock is free and will remain free and will never cost monetary values to use the contents of it or place information on it. Light from the fiber optic inter-connects would be magnified and sent to to solar panels and then that energy would be used to power the system. It would be electrically efficient. This idea was invented by Shampoo.
You don't have time and/or budget to do things properly? That's fine - but realise that doing things that way means that, sooner or later, you WILL have outages and problems. That's a risk, and you need to mitigate it somehow. If a certain number of hours a year of downtime through lack of testing is a "better" alternative for your business than the expense of the staff/resources to do things properly, that may be an acceptable choice, but don't whine when things DO go wrong.
However, if you expect untested patches and upgrades to always apply successfully to your production servers without incident, then you are simply a fool. Please don't ever come and work for me.
I would absolutely trust it in a mission critical environment.
I've worked in large organisations that have ditched both BMC Patrol and HP OpenView in favour of Nagios, monitoring tens of thousands of services (many of them business critical) on thousands of servers, over geographically dispersed WANs. It was extremely reliable, easier and faster to set up, more flexible, much easier to implement custom service check plugins, required fewer hardware resources to run, and gave a massive dollar saving as well.
If you cared to spend a couple of minutes with Google, you'd find there are even larger organisations using Nagios to monitor environments that make the ones I mentioned seem insignificant.
There *are* certain specialised features of products from BMC, Tivoli, HP and so on which aren't available in something like Nagios - and they can be worth the money if you really need them (e.g. I use Tivoli products to closely monitor our WebSphere applications); but if you are only choosing those (extremely expensive) commercial products out of a fear of open-source software, then you are simply a fool.
I guess this goes to show that being a "senior vice president in charge of operations" doesn't mean you have a clue what you are talking about...
Agree with you there - Lotus Notes is a huge WTF in its own right.
Many of their other product families are very different though. For starters, most of them actually work - at least most of the time:)
Other than Notes, I haven't had an IBM product put me into a murderous rage since WebSphere 3.5... but even IBM people admit that version was horrible!
There's a reason that large companies care about certification on various platforms - if they are going to make an investment of hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars in a platform or product suite, they want to be damn sure that it will all work properly together, and continue to do so for its anticipated lifetime. "It should work" just doesn't cut it.
The configure/make approach produces so many possible combinations of slightly different builds/configurations of a product that certification and support of all of them is pretty much impossible - therefore enterprise customers won't touch it. No customers, no business.
That, and the fact that configure/make don't help much without releasing source code (which isn't going to happen for commercial apps), are why you almost never see it in commercially-supported software.
"IBM's products don't really work on Linux, they work on one particular outdated version of RHEL and one version of Suse"
Simply not true. IBM's support for Linux, in my experience, is very good - at least for the distros their customers are actually running in any significant numbers.
I've run significant portions of the WebSphere, Tivoli, Rational and DB2 product families on RHEL 3, RHEL 4, SLES 9, and SLES 10 (that's the current and previous versions of both). Unsurprisingly, since they are certified for all of those, they worked just fine.
I've also run many of them on unsupported distros - RHEL 2.1, CentOS (no surprise), Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Debian - for development and test/evaluation systems. Generally, if you are running a relatively "normal" distribution, with a similar kernel version to the supported RHEL/SLES distros, it will probably work just fine unless it is a product that does distro-specific stuff, which is rare.
The only issue I've encountered at all like you mention is when trying to use the "launchpad" feature to initiate the install - since it is web-based, it requires a web browser to run, and I don't tend to have one my servers. Running the actual installer itself works just fine.
Absolutely. I have no problem with paying what I regard to be a fair price for music/movies/whatever - but I refuse to buy something if it has DRM on it that will restrict my use of it. This would make me either camp 1 (or maybe 3...) - except I'm quite happy to pay for DRM-protected content if I can't easily buy a non-DRM version, AND I can easily strip the DRM from what I buy. If it is more convenient for me to pay a few bucks to quickly and easily find a high-quality version of something I can use freely, than it is for me to hunt down a decent-quality pirated copy, I am more than happy to do so.
I pay, I download, I strip the DRM, then I use how I please. It may be technically *illegal* anywhere that has DMCA-type laws, but frankly anyone who says it is *wrong* can bite my shiny metal ass.
My preference is, and will always be, in order: 1. Pay a *fair* price to quickly and easily buy a legal, DRM-free version 2. Spend time/effort to find a pirated/cracked copy 3. Buy a DRM-infected version and remove the DRM
I utterly refuse to buy DRM content if I do not already possess the means to remove it easily and permanently.
DRM will never stop piracy (to quote mulix64: "If you can play it, you can decrypt it") - all it does is inconvenience paying customers, turns some otherwise-paying customers to piracy, and presents only a trivial obstacle to piracy.
As soon as the MPAA/RIAA realises there are many people out there with the same views, the sooner they will start making better profits from online sales, WITHOUT pissing off their customers.
> If 1 in 5 worldwide child deaths occur in India, how many child deaths per capita does that represent in India?
Umm.. given that India has about 1/5 of the world population, if 1 in 5 worldwide child deaths occur in India, it makes the child mortality rate about the same as the average for the rest of the world.
Lies, damn lies and statistics...
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Yes, you can. I was more referring to if/when my storage requirements exceeded 5 of the largest available drives...
I'll second that - I have a QNAP TS-509 with 5 x 2Tb drives, and I have nothing but good things to say about it. Performance is excellent - transfers to/from it routinely hit about 80-90% utilisation on my Gbit LAN without any fuss. If/when the capacity of 5 drives is no longer enough for me, I strongly suspect I will either add a second one or upgrade to one of the 8-drive models.
I bought one of these too, as a cheap NAS solution for some backups and such - and I thought it was a complete pile of garbage. Functionally it was quite OK (once you jump through the necessary hoops to trick it into firing up SSH), but the thing that absolutely killed it for me was speed.
It's hard to describe how pathetically slow the transfer rates were. I tried numerous transfer methods: scp/sftp, rsync (over rsh and ssh), SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP. The best speeds I got were FTP, and that was all of about 15 Mbit/s, with CPU pegged at 100% for entire transfer. Slowest was SFTP (presumably due to the encryption overhead), at about 4 Mbit/s. Why they bothered putting a Gigabit NIC in it I do not know. Since I wanted it mainly for backups of other machines (i.e. a couple of hundred Gb of fulls and several Gb of incrementals), it wasn't even remotely up to the task.
It's quite noisy for its size too - OK when idling, but the fan rate (and corresponding noise) jumps up whenever you do anything significant with it.
I ended up pulling the drives out and putting them in another PC (they are perfectly normal WD SATA drives), and throwing the rest away.
My advice: don't waste your money.
From my experience, the best way to earn the respect of your customers/users is to consistently deliver good service. Do all the behind-the-scenes hard yards to ensure the systems you look after are stable, reliable, and performing well (even though the users never have any visibility of this, or appreciate just how much work it takes to do). When something does go wrong - when, not if - even if it is not your fault, be professional, polite, friendly, and above all keep the user(s) informed of progress (particularly if it takes a long time to solve the problem). If the users actually know you are working hard on solving their issues, they generally appreciate it even if they don't have a clue what you are actually doing.
Remember users are not IT people, and don't understand the complexities of IT systems. Even when a problem is entirely their fault (which is unfortunately frequent), try to explain to them in clear layman's terms the correct way to do whatever they are trying to do. Even if it is a case of colossal stupidity on their part, reserve your scorn and laughter for when you relay the story to your other IT colleagues, and not when talking to the user.
If all else fails, remember that being respected by everyone isn't a job necessity, nor is it always possible. It's very unlikely you will be able to please everyone all the time. In my job, I generally have a choice between having the users hate us (because we've allowed unstable/unreliable systems through to production), or having project managers hate us (because we won't allow their shoddy rushed garbage through in order to meet their poorly planned deadlines). I opt for the latter - my job is to provide services to the end users, not to make sure project managers get their bonuses.
Australia is *not* part of the UK. It is a member of the Commonwealth - as are pretty much all of the former British colonies. It is no more a part of the UK than Canada is.
I don't have any OSX clients, sorry, or much experience with OSX in general. But the NAS itself is basically just a Linux box (it runs BusyBox), and uses ext3 filesystems and Samba/NFS. So I presume that OSX clients would work just as well (or badly, if that is the case) as they would with any similar Linux setup.
I don't run a great deal of the out-of-the-box software on mine, as I already have a couple of Linux servers for those sorts of duties. I mainly use mine for backups, music/video storage for an HTPC, and iSCSI targets for a bunch of VMware machines. But you can run pretty much whatever you want on it - there's a package management system built in which makes it easy to install a whole truckload of third-party prepackaged software (check out http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/ts509/cross/stable/), or you can just use that to install gcc and then compile anything else yourself.
I bought one of these a few months ago, and stuck 5 x 1Tb drives in it. It's certainly not the cheapest solution, but I don't regret it for a minute - it's fast (I get pretty similar speeds to those reported in the SmallNetBuilder review), quiet (can just barely hear the fan, and there is very little drive noise), reliable, easy to set up and use, and the fact that I can simply SSH into it and install/run whatever I like on there is a huge bonus. It has dual Gbit NICs and supports Samba, NFS and iSCSI, and a whole truckload of other features. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something like this.
I also have invented a process for creating a rock inside of a computer, one that all of the people in the world could artificially engrave in a tombstone-style text whatever they wish. If built, this rock would enable all people on Earth to store one paragraph or more worth of information that would be permanently stored on the computer. The information stored would outlive the person whom engraved the rock because the rock would be of a 0.8 micron process with 500,000 transistors in the space of a 486 Central Processing Unit. A 486 Central Processing Unit actually has over 800,000 transistors. My design would be more reliable than a 486. Some people may think that a 0.8 micron process is too slow - this is incorrect if it is a 1024 bit or higher processor, then it could do more in increased volume than a smaller processor. The processor would last many hundreds of years and this is why the space shuttle uses similar technology - where failure is not an option. The information engraved in the rock which is purple and blue and marble-like and is black in some areas where the operating system blocks out information that a person may chose to remove from the rock. The information people place on the rock is permanent. Data is stored in the style of something similar to a Nintendo video game cartridge which is Read Only Memory (ROM) and will almost certainly last many lifetimes before failure. The rock is rectangular and information within it could be searched through or zoomed in and out of viewing range. The rock would cost based on the price of data storage media. For instance: an 80 GigaByte hard disk can hold 80 billion characters of information - this would give every single person on Earth approximately 13 characters of information on the rock for about $50 worth of failure prone storage like a personal computer hard disk. The design intentions are to make the rock outlast 10's of lifetimes before repair, to be redundant in all ways and last for eternity. The rock is for love letters, poems, eulogies and anything at all. This rock is free and will remain free and will never cost monetary values to use the contents of it or place information on it. Light from the fiber optic inter-connects would be magnified and sent to to solar panels and then that energy would be used to power the system. It would be electrically efficient. This idea was invented by Shampoo.
You don't have time and/or budget to do things properly? That's fine - but realise that doing things that way means that, sooner or later, you WILL have outages and problems. That's a risk, and you need to mitigate it somehow. If a certain number of hours a year of downtime through lack of testing is a "better" alternative for your business than the expense of the staff/resources to do things properly, that may be an acceptable choice, but don't whine when things DO go wrong.
However, if you expect untested patches and upgrades to always apply successfully to your production servers without incident, then you are simply a fool. Please don't ever come and work for me.
I would absolutely trust it in a mission critical environment.
I've worked in large organisations that have ditched both BMC Patrol and HP OpenView in favour of Nagios, monitoring tens of thousands of services (many of them business critical) on thousands of servers, over geographically dispersed WANs. It was extremely reliable, easier and faster to set up, more flexible, much easier to implement custom service check plugins, required fewer hardware resources to run, and gave a massive dollar saving as well.
If you cared to spend a couple of minutes with Google, you'd find there are even larger organisations using Nagios to monitor environments that make the ones I mentioned seem insignificant.
There *are* certain specialised features of products from BMC, Tivoli, HP and so on which aren't available in something like Nagios - and they can be worth the money if you really need them (e.g. I use Tivoli products to closely monitor our WebSphere applications); but if you are only choosing those (extremely expensive) commercial products out of a fear of open-source software, then you are simply a fool.
I guess this goes to show that being a "senior vice president in charge of operations" doesn't mean you have a clue what you are talking about...
Agree with you there - Lotus Notes is a huge WTF in its own right.
:)
Many of their other product families are very different though. For starters, most of them actually work - at least most of the time
Other than Notes, I haven't had an IBM product put me into a murderous rage since WebSphere 3.5... but even IBM people admit that version was horrible!
There's a reason that large companies care about certification on various platforms - if they are going to make an investment of hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars in a platform or product suite, they want to be damn sure that it will all work properly together, and continue to do so for its anticipated lifetime. "It should work" just doesn't cut it.
The configure/make approach produces so many possible combinations of slightly different builds/configurations of a product that certification and support of all of them is pretty much impossible - therefore enterprise customers won't touch it. No customers, no business.
That, and the fact that configure/make don't help much without releasing source code (which isn't going to happen for commercial apps), are why you almost never see it in commercially-supported software.
"IBM's products don't really work on Linux, they work on one particular outdated version of RHEL and one version of Suse"
Simply not true. IBM's support for Linux, in my experience, is very good - at least for the distros their customers are actually running in any significant numbers.
I've run significant portions of the WebSphere, Tivoli, Rational and DB2 product families on RHEL 3, RHEL 4, SLES 9, and SLES 10 (that's the current and previous versions of both). Unsurprisingly, since they are certified for all of those, they worked just fine.
I've also run many of them on unsupported distros - RHEL 2.1, CentOS (no surprise), Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Debian - for development and test/evaluation systems. Generally, if you are running a relatively "normal" distribution, with a similar kernel version to the supported RHEL/SLES distros, it will probably work just fine unless it is a product that does distro-specific stuff, which is rare.
The only issue I've encountered at all like you mention is when trying to use the "launchpad" feature to initiate the install - since it is web-based, it requires a web browser to run, and I don't tend to have one my servers. Running the actual installer itself works just fine.
Absolutely. I have no problem with paying what I regard to be a fair price for music/movies/whatever - but I refuse to buy something if it has DRM on it that will restrict my use of it. This would make me either camp 1 (or maybe 3...) - except I'm quite happy to pay for DRM-protected content if I can't easily buy a non-DRM version, AND I can easily strip the DRM from what I buy. If it is more convenient for me to pay a few bucks to quickly and easily find a high-quality version of something I can use freely, than it is for me to hunt down a decent-quality pirated copy, I am more than happy to do so.
I pay, I download, I strip the DRM, then I use how I please. It may be technically *illegal* anywhere that has DMCA-type laws, but frankly anyone who says it is *wrong* can bite my shiny metal ass.
My preference is, and will always be, in order:
1. Pay a *fair* price to quickly and easily buy a legal, DRM-free version
2. Spend time/effort to find a pirated/cracked copy
3. Buy a DRM-infected version and remove the DRM
I utterly refuse to buy DRM content if I do not already possess the means to remove it easily and permanently.
DRM will never stop piracy (to quote mulix64: "If you can play it, you can decrypt it") - all it does is inconvenience paying customers, turns some otherwise-paying customers to piracy, and presents only a trivial obstacle to piracy.
As soon as the MPAA/RIAA realises there are many people out there with the same views, the sooner they will start making better profits from online sales, WITHOUT pissing off their customers.
I've seen fingerprint readers defeated by Gummi Bears...
> If 1 in 5 worldwide child deaths occur in India, how many child deaths per capita does that represent in India? Umm.. given that India has about 1/5 of the world population, if 1 in 5 worldwide child deaths occur in India, it makes the child mortality rate about the same as the average for the rest of the world. Lies, damn lies and statistics...