[Cialug] Virtual Box and NAS

[Matt Stanton]

Speaking of Dell Powervaults and fibre-channel arrays,  I have a Dell Powervault 660 with an add-on drive shelf that would give you a grand total of 20 76GB 10k rpm drives.  I also have a couple of fibre-channel switches that match and a few HBAs...  I'd sell it all for a lot less than I have in it if you wanted something relatively quick to deal with.

It's just that it's radically old, and 20 drives gets you like 1TB in a RAID5 configuration.  ;)

-- Matt

William Christensen <staticphantom at gmail.com> wrote:

>If you have the money, look at QNAP. But I'm with David, for the price  
>and performance building your own is really the way to go. I'm curious  
>if there is a noticeable difference in power consumption though.
>
>-Will
>
>On Aug 12, 2011, at 4:20 PM, David Champion wrote:
>
>> You would expect that, but some real-world testing of the cheap NAS  
>> boxes shows differently. They use really low-end Marvell imbedded  
>> chipsets.
>>
>> You can buy a Dell T110 for about the same price as a soho NAS,  
>> sometimes cheaper. It has a "real" processor, a good Intel gigabit  
>> NIC, and can hold 4 SATA drives, and has an ESATA port. Put your  
>> favorite NAS type OS on it or even just a generic Linux distro, and  
>> it's going to beat the pants off a Netgear or Dlink NAS, and  
>> probably be more stable.
>>
>> Google for NAS benchmarks, there are several out there.
>>
>> -dc
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org>  
>> wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Dave Hala Jr <dave at 58ghz.net> wrote:
>> I really doesn't appear that there is much differance between the
>> Readynas 1500 and the entry level Powervaults.
>>
>> My intent is virtualize about 6 servers and most likely launch the  
>> VM's
>> from a central location. They are mostly low-medium traffic  
>> webservers.
>>
>> I'm not against building a server, but ya know, if I can just buy one
>> and plug it in, that's not always a bad thing.  I was hoping to stay
>> around the 1500-3k range. How many people actually build there own  
>> rack
>> servers anymore?
>>
>>
>> I totally agree. I would expect that a GigE connection to a RAID  
>> array (with presumably fast seek times) should be able to approach  
>> an IDE drive's performance. I don't know much about these NAS's  
>> you're mentioning but I've seen a low cost consumer device that can  
>> NOT saturate the GigE port and seem to be bandwidth limited by  
>> internal architecture. (<$200 units)
>>
>> According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Comparison_to_other_interfaces 
>>  it suggests that IDE bandwidth just slightly exceeds 1Gb/s.  
>> Considering TCP/IP overhead that means you should probably expect  
>> slow-ide like performance at best. Probably not a great plan if your  
>> VMs need much i/o bandwidth. Fibre channel looks like a better  
>> choice if you can get it.
>>
>> I'll show my inexperience with this question: Is GigE 1Gb/s each way  
>> (total 2Gb/s) assuming you have a full duplex connection? If so then  
>> maybe IDE-like performance isn't unreasonable to expect.
>>
>> -- 
>> Matthew Nuzum
>> newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter
>>
>>
>> ♫ You're never fully dressed without a smile! ♫
>>
>>
>>
>>
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