Home
| Calendar
| Mail Lists
| List Archives
| Desktop SIG
| Hardware Hacking SIG
Wiki | Flickr | PicasaWeb | Video | Maps & Directions | Installfests | Keysignings Linux Cafe | Meeting Notes | Blog | Linux Links | Bling | About BLU |
Bob Keyes wrote: > At my new job, we have a NAS "Snap Appliance", which is pretty > horrible and I want to get rid of it. So I am going to push for > a Linux solution. I'd want RAID level 5, and Serial ATA drives, > and of course linux niceness. I was looking at the Adaptec > 2810SA, but it's got 8 ports..I though you needed 9 for RAID5 > (one for each bit plus one parity) or am I misunderstanding > this? I'd also want hot-swappable. Anyone have any suggestions? I've read through some of the responses and have a couple things to add: - I think the Snap product *is* Linux-based. What you're wanting, of course, is control over the O/S environment in your server. - You don't say explain what features of the NAS box make it horrible in your situation, or what level of performance you're lokoing for. - The stated requirements of serial ATA and hot-swap imply high-end hardware that will come at a hefty price. I'm frugal, personally, and generally question whether high-priced features really fit the bill. For example, hot-swap can be justified on a mail server at an ISP but not at most 9-to-5 corporate sites where it's easy enough to shut the system off for 5 minutes at the end of the workday. Serial ATA can be justified if you need 15,000rpm drives because the system is handling 1000 transactions per second in a banking app, but not if you're running a Clearcase server for a half-dozen VB programmers. - A $75 motherboard with a $85 CPU has enough horsepower and IDE ports to run software RAID1 or RAID5 on four drives in 98% of the environments that I've seen. - You don't get any penalty for running RAID1 in software, and you can't get a performance boost running RAID1 in hardware, on a 2-drive system. You would get a performance boost running hardware RAID5 vs. software RAID5, but the boost may not be measurable if your application is not I/O-bound. Advances in hardware performance have outraced application requirements in most situations for a few years now. Just because a high-end product is available does not mean it's worth paying the premium. > For backup, I am thinking the Sony AIT-2 changer, LIB-D81/A2. Don't > know if it's compatible with Bacula though... Thumbs up to AIT-2. I use a Cybernetics/Spectra changer for my AIT-2 drive at home. The SCSI standard for changers is widespread: any brand should work with any Linux or Windows software. I use amanda for backups and am more-or-less happy with it, though I wish it were more popular and were getting more new features and bug-fixes. -rich
BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups | |
We also thank MIT for the use of their facilities. |