SMB NAS Roundup
by Ross Whitehead Jason Clark Dave Muysson on December 5, 2006 3:30 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Conclusion
We had a hard time naming a true winner in this roundup. When we generated the feature list to compare these units side-by-side, we started to realize that what we really had are two different types of devices. First we have devices that cater to the home user who wants multimedia and ease-of-use features. Second we have devices that cater to small businesses that desire more security and network features.
None of these devices broke any land speed records (except for the Hammer), which we hope vendors will fix in the future. Although the Hammer unit peaked at over 70 Megabytes per second, it did so using nearly 70% of the CPU on the client accessing it. We think this is entirely too high, and some optimization on the client software needs to be performed. Still, assuming your CPU is generally sitting idle (which is often the case), some people will be happy to sacrifice CPU usage for increased speeds. The Infrant device was the best performer out of the rest of the devices, followed by LaCie, Thecus and QNAP.
Home
We selected the Infrant NV+ device as the winner in the home category, due to its performance and feature set. Infrant had an extensive feature set targeted at the home user, which included features like a DHCP Server, UPnP, USB Device Support, and Streaming services.
Business
The QNAP TS401-T unit was the clear winner for the Business market. The features that stood out are the optional redundant power, redundant NICs, UPS support, SNMP support, Network Printer Sharing, CD/DVD Backup, Active Directory Integration, and Quotas.
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yyrkoon - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
My problem is this: I want redundancy, but I also do not want to be limited to GbE transfer rates. I've been in communication with many people, via different channels (email, IRC, forums, etc), and the best results I've seen anyone get on GbE is around 90MB/s using specific NIC cards (Intel pro series, PCI-E).The options here are rather limited. I like Linux, however, I refuse to use Ethernet channel bonding (thus forcing the use of Linux on all my machines), or possibly a combination of Ethernet channel bonding, with a very expensive 802.11 a/d switch. 10GbE is is an option, but is way out of my price range, and 4GB FC doesn't seem to be much better. From my limited understanding of their product, Intel pro cards I think come with software to be used in aggregate load balancing, but I'm not 100% sure of this, and unless I used cross over cables from one machine, to another, I would be forced into paying $300usd or possibly more for a 802.11 a/d switch again. I've looked into all these options, plus 1394b firewire teaming, and SATA port multipliers. Port multiplier technology looks promising, but is Dependant on motherboard RAID (unless you shell out for a HBA), but from what I do know about it, you couldn't just plug it in to a Areca card, and have it work at full performance (someone correct me if I'm wrong please, Id love top learn otherwise).
My goal, is to have a reliable storage solution, with minimal wait times when transferring files. At some point, having too much would be overkill, and this also needs to be realized.
peternelson - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
It sounds like your needs would be solved by using a fiber channel fabric.
You need a FC nic (or two) in each of your clients, then one or more FC switches eg from Brocade or oems of their switches. Finally you need drive arrays to connect FC or regular drives onto the FC fabric.
It isn't cheap but gives fantastic redundancy. FC speeds are 1/2/4 Gigabits per second.
yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 5, 2006 - link
I've been giving Areca a lot of thought lately. What I was considering, was to use a complete system for storage, loads of disk space, with an Areca RAID controller. The only problem I personally have with my idea here is: how do I get a fast link to the desktop PC ?I've been debating back and forth with a friend of mine about using firewire. From what he says, you can use multiple firewire links, teamed, along with some "hack" ? for raising to get 1394b to 1000MBit/s, to achieve what seems like outstanding performance. Assuming what my friend says is accurate, you could easily team 4x 1394b ports, and get 500MB/s.