New NAS help/suggestions

H

h0mez

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 6, 2006
Messages
444
I recently have to put together a system in prep for NAS. I need something that has iSCSI so I can setup hosts for vMotion. And the something for media storage and torrenting.

My hardware at the moment:

Supermico X8SIL
Intel Xeon X3350
8gb DDR3 ECC
4x 2tb WD Reds
Dell Perc 5/i
Norco 4220
Intel Quad Port NIC
Sandisk SSD 180gb for OS

I tried messing with Server 2012 storage spaces, and not a fan. I was hoping to go with some thing windows based because that's what I'm familiar with. But I'm willing to branch out. Any suggestions?
 
Just not a fan of using it to handle the software raid
 
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OI (or OmniOS)/Napp-IT/ZFS is actually quite easy to get going. I personally went the all-in-one route and have been running it for over a year now. Could not be happier with the result.
 
OI/ OmniOS/ Solaris includes Comstar, a very powerful and fast iSCSI stack
(although I prefer NFS for easyness)

Beside that ZFS is what you want for a SAN.
WinRe is build upon the same principles but not as good (maybee in some years)

And do not care about learning too much.
A ZFS Web-storage-appliance is more powerful and faster with more features, needs less reboots and is mostly easier to handle than Windows
 
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I had OI/napp-it installed in a different box previously as VM, and wasn't getting the performance I was looking for. It could have been me or the hardware, who knows. I did recently acquire this new hardware so I can have a standalone NAS. I am trying FreeNAS right now, and if that doesn't work I might go back to OI
 
If there is no other problem, Solaris and Comstar are one of the fastest options for iSCSI

see some benches at zfsbuild about
http://www.zfsbuild.com/category/benchmarks/

If you are using Jumboframes, you must enable this in the driver.config.
For iSCSI you should use a blocksize of 64k or more and enable writeback cache for performance tests (or add a fast ZIL)

I have added some benches with different disks and settings at http://napp-it.org/doc/manuals/benchmarks_5_2013.pdf
and some general tuning options at http://napp-it.org/manuals/tuning.html
 
Thanks! I might have to go back to that. I mostly a noob to this stuff, so half the battle is finding something thats popular where I can read up on issues, and debug performance issues.
 
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