Good morning all:

So this is kind of a generalized question but I¹m going to throw it out here
anyways!  I have a rack of 2950¹s with 15k SAS drives on PERC controllers.
These boxes work great, no problems.

Until now, my usage of these machines has always been specifically
application targeted and I¹ve deployed in Windows and Linux.  Of course I¹m
partial to Linux.  I¹ve never worried about multi-platform client support
before.

Now, what I want and need to do it build a high performance storage system
out of some of these machines.  They will not be clustered or load balanced
or anything like that.  Each box will be completely stand-alone and
independent of the other (different boxes, different customers).

So...  I have x numbers of drives on in a RAID5 array for y number of
gigabytes of disk space.  My question is, how should I go about setting up a
high performance storage system that will support multiple clients (ie
Windows, MacOS and Unix) but be very very fast.  I¹ve tried FreeNAS,
OpenFiler, ClarkConnect and ClearOS (newer ClarkConnect) and I¹m just not
seeing the performance I need.

The problem I see with these solutions is that sharing files to a Windows
box, the performance is ok but not great.  However sharing files to a Mac or
Linux box (via smb, cifs or nfs) just flat sucks.  FTP works fine but then
again, using FTP, Active Directory authentication is so slow it¹s almost
unbearable.

Any recommendations???  Of course I would prefer open source but if I have
to pony up a few bucks to get some kind of a commercial product that¹ll do
what I need, I will.  All the boxes have dual GigE connections that are
trunked to the switches, so effectively 2GB of bandwidth coming from each
box.  Also all the boxes have 8 (or more) GB of RAM, so, hardware
performance isn¹t so much an issue.

Thanks!

-b
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