I was in need of a Linux/BSD based NAS about 5 months back, and here are some of my thoughts. I tried Netgear's ReadyNAS 11000, Adaptec's Snap 410, FreeNAS and OpenFiler, and had a dabble with Sanat. Following is some detail of my experiences.
I started with the Netgear ReadyNAS. It comes in 2 flavors - desktop and rack-mount. The former is very nice for smaller applications - your music/video jukebox or home server or something of that ilk. The rack-mount I thought would be good for a business environment. The software is good, and you get source to most of it, except for the management interface (a perl-based solution) which leaves a lot to be desired. The thing was slow and gave me problems in a Windows Active Directory environment. These are well documented in the ReadyNAS wiki, which, btw, is really a boon. Netgear has tried to answer the community's needs and puts a fair amount of effort (I think through employee input) into catering to the public. Responses were relatively good. Also the NAS software had plugins that allowed for root access through SSH and some other stuff. The bad news: I had 2 disk failures with the rack-mount within 2 weeks. I also had very poor network throughput for my 65 users who were sharing data on this box. The box had 512MB RAM. I found out that this was horribly insufficient for a small business. I also found out after going through hours of support calls that the rack-mount device has no 1GB memory available that works with it (yes really)! So I returned the box to the distributor (Rashi Peripherals, who, btw, were completely useless as support for this device). I next tried the Adaptec Snap Server 410. Similar configuration, but this box at least supported more memory. I tried it out with 2GB. The software is based on GuardianOS, which as I understand is a Linux variant. I did not look at the source closely. The box has really lame management software, which is not terribly configurable. The console login allows a very limited shell environment for a few mostly log-related apps. Shell access was really not of any use on this box thanks to this crippled environment. The OS and management interface halted and could not be made to recover within the first 3 days. I spent a week trying to make it do something useful, and calling Adaptec support in the US (the guys in Mumbai and Blore were completely unable to provide any help) and finally gave up. The box was sent back to the distributor (Renaissance Systems I believe). I also talked to Sanat. I decided not to proceed with them (very competent and knowledgeable technically, btw) because they would not give me root access to their NAS equipment, and because they wanted an annual service contract. These things may have changed in the time I dealt with them, so best to contact them directly. FreeNAS worked very well - easy install and lots of convenient things. But the interface left a lot to be desired. I had some difficulties with Active Directory integration, but I can't really recall off-hand what they were (sorry). I then tried OpenFiler, which is Linux (rpath, I believe) based. Install was a snap. So much so that a guy with almost no technical background was able to do an install with only phone guidance from me. The interface is very good, but has a few kinks that I believe are going to be ironed out in the latest version (2.3). The system is easy to use. The documentation is very good. The community support is very good (openfiler.com). The only complaint I would have about it is that it does not come with a stable, snapshot backup system. I had to install rsnapshot independently, which was pretty easy. rPath has virtual appliances for OpenFiler which I've tried on a test environment and it works very well. OpenFiler did almost everything (including iSCSI, which I was initially dubious about, but am now pretty sold on) that all the other products did, including Sanat's. At present I'm running OpenFiler in a 70-person environment with absolutely no glitches for the last 3 months. It's not perfect, but then again, what is?! For the price this is an outstanding solution. Actually for anthing under 3lacs this is an outstanding solution. Above 3lacs you may as well just pay OpenFiler :) So my recommendation is to get some server-grade hardware, put OpenFiler on it, and rest easy. The real issue with any NAS/SAN product is whether you have the ability to support the product yourself. If you don't, learn. The commercial guys who claim they'll support you are just trying to make a buck. My experience was that I could not count on them (the commercial guys anyway) and ultimately ended up having to rely on myself (yeah, nothing new there i guess). HTH. _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
