Looking for storage experts
 

Hello,

Guys I need to know if we have anyone who has domain expertise in storage. This is the area where I'm weakest and have been a drag for me over the last month or so.

I'm looking for a solution that would allow me to store lots of data. Requirement will be to serve both iSCSI and NFS over 1Gbps network (not getting FC or 10Gbps). Not looking for performance here but capacity needs to be scalable by adding JBODs and protection of data via software (ie not hardware RAID) is important.

I don't want to use EXT4. This leaves me with ZFS and btrfs. So far btrfs is not production ready so unless someone can convince me otherwise I'd like to discount this.

This leaves ZFS which is great except it's a Solaris based platform and therefore not available for Linux based distros out of the box. I'm wary of installing zfsonlinux because it's just recently gone production and I think there are still problems or missing features.

This leaves me with the following options:
Non Storage Vendor Solution
Install Solaris / FreeBSD
I'm extremely familiar with Linux but have bad experiences with Solaris before so am probably not going to do this unless I have researched and tested it. Do we have any Solaris / FreeBSD ZFS gurus here?

Storage Vendor Solution
I'm only listing the ZFS based vendors I have come to find.

FreeNAS / TrueNAS
The FreeNAS product is very popular but lacks certain features TrueNAS provides that I'd consider good to have. Anyone has experiences with TrueNAS and can comment about your experience with them with their products and services?

Racktop Systems
These guys are a bit too expensive for what it's worth. Happy to hear your experience with them though.

Eon NAS
The most memory I see available for their top model is only 32GB. This is a bit on the small side. Anyone have used their products before? Think we can relieve the memory problem by adding SSD SLOG devices?

Nexanta
Great company but they charge by how much you use for the license so I'm not getting there. Yes there's a community version but I want more.

So who has expertise with ZFS or have used TrueNAS or Eon NAS before? Or any other vendors to recommend?

Titus

Maybe look at a mac... Eg a hackintosh if you dont have a mac...or a simple macmini server running mac osx server and hook it up to some thunderbolt jbods like the new 5x 5gb drives recently brought out by lacie( or 6 tb but not aue if you buy one of the constellation sever grade drives) with https://code.google.com/p/maczfs/ installed. Mac os is unix bsd based.

Looking for storage experts
 

Hello

Thanks. I did explore that for a bit with OS X but it it needs to run on Mac hardware to be supported and Apple no longer sell servers. Will take a look at your link but if it's not a commercial product with support then I'm leaning towards using napp-it on top of OpenIndiana or downloading Solaris from Sun to do it ourselves.

Do we have any napp-it or OpenIndiana or Solaris gurus here?



Titus

When you say storage, how many gallons are we talking here ? Are you including a sump as well?

Hello

Dude.... It's server storage....


Titus

He could be talking about an ATO reservoir