NAS devices

[Richard Pieri]

On Jun 1, 2010, at 8:11 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> 
> In terms of performance, reliability, speed, backups, and every
> characteristic that I can basically think of mattering in a NAS, I would say
> solaris/opensolaris/ZFS would be the better solution.

OpenAFS on, well, any Unix of your choice beats ZFS for all of the above.  ZFS's snapshot and clone mechanisms are straight from AFS.  With redundant OpenAFS file server machines you'll find it hard to beat it for reliability.  The OpenAFS cache mechanism blows away any other SAN or NAS for speed.  Better security, better scalability across disk devices and clients, the easiest and most transparent volume migration I've ever seen, OpenAFS wins, hands down.

On the other hand, OpenAFS needs more work to initially set up, and it requires a Kerberos realm.  The lock mechanism doesn't work (intentionally) for large, shared databases.  It's designed for large scale university environments: lots of concurrent users with lots of files on lots of nodes distributed around a large geographic area.  OpenAFS is overkill for a small shop with a handful of users.

Anyway, just noting it as an option.

--Rich P.