[Cialug] iSCSI SAN / NAS

[Nathan C. Smith]

Don't fear the freeNAS.  It's good kool-aid.  I'm using it at home and it is testing out well so far.  It's very lean.  You can easily set up iSCSI target on a Linux box too.

We are using a Promise iSCSI system that we built for about the amount you have budgeted- their Chassis, our Seagate drives.  The Promise name isn't actually inspiring and I think I will be looking for something more robust like HP for the next system.  However, I have been very pleased with Promise support so far and it is hard to beat the price.  They seem to be collaborating with Apple too.  Apparently a lot of the hardware is made by a company called LSI for Promise, IBM, Lefthand and others.

A while back Dave W. was asking about the Coraid solution ATA over Ethernet.  I was hesitant, but that's because I was ignorant.  I'm looking at it again because it actually works very much like iSCSI but the protocol isn't as complicated and it cannot be routed.  You may want to peek at it.

Do you want to use Bacula to back up the iSCSI volumes or just share some of the space with Bacula for backups?  I would be leery of backing up the iSCSI volumes directly, at least until I did a lot of testing.  Especially if it was formatted as a non-Linux-native file system like NTFS.

-Nate




> -----Original Message-----
> From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org
> [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of Jim Cole
> Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 10:23 PM
> To: cialug at cialug.org
> Subject: [Cialug] iSCSI SAN / NAS
>
> I'm in the market for a iSCSI SAN / NAS solution. I have a
> limited budget of about $8000. I'm looking at either building
> it with a 24 drive sata chassis(not full but available for
> future growth) and a Asus quad core opteron board / 3ware
> controller, etc OR purchasing HPs starter AiO1200R(and seeing
> if I can not order drives and put in my own 1 TB sata disks).
> This maxes as 12 SATA drives.
>
> The HP solution is simple to admin, windows 2003 based(for
> good or bad), etc.
>
> Does anyone know of a easy to admin linux based system? I
> want to run more things on it than just a san/nas..I'm
> thinking of running Bacula on it. I've looked at OpenFiler
> and FreeNAS. Neither one run a flavor of linux I'm
> confortable with(RHEL, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu are my linux
> favs). Anyone have any other suggestions? I'm not familar
> with rpath linux or if I can run bacula on it. My issue is
> I'm not a storage specialist and neither is the rest of my
> team so something easy to admin would help...preferable OSS.
>
> Thanks!
> -Jim
>
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