[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I am looking around for a suitable (ie, reasonably priced and performance)
NAS unit in order to convert a bunch of standalone servers into a cluster.
SATA RAID units seem to be what I am looking for.
I would appreciate those out there who have experience using NAS boxes for
this purpose to share your wisdom.
What are you using ? How has it been working for you ? Any performance issues during busy times etc ?
Thanks a lot. Lu
From: Clayton Weise [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
We use netapps (www.netapp.com) and it works great. One of the big things that made me move towards the netapp in place of many of the other NAS units out there was the fact that it runs a nix based OS. Most of the ones, say..
Dell for example just run a stripped down version of windows with file sharing for unix. It doesn't give you the ability to make any tweaks to the nfs server. We've been using the netapps for about 6 months now and it's been awesome. A client that hosts in our datacenter turned us on to the netapps nas units. He's been using them for I think about 2 years now and swears by them.
That's great to hear.
Can you let me know the specific model you are using ?
They recently introduced some lower-end models that cannot be expanded to such a high degree and also may lack clustering-support, depending on the exact model.
They run a real-time OS, but can be accessed via ssh and a web-interface.
NetApp is really the high-end of storage, but also from a price-viewpoint.
But if you have enough customers and/or pretty strict SLAs, there's hardly a choice, unless you want to gamble ;-)
How many domains are you currently handling with the above unit ?
Also, do you have any redundancy capability in case that box goes down ?
The clustering-software is very expensive - and you've got to buy a 2nd NetApp, too. ;-)
Ask a local NetApp distributor for more info.
Rainer
