Speedy NAS?

TeeJayHoward

TeeJayHoward

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Is it possible to build/buy an NAS that can sustain file transfers at speeds in excess of 100MB/s? If so... How?

(Please save the "It's too expensive for you" and "You don't need that much speed" comments. I'm just curious.)
 
Fibre Channel, or a sort of SSD NAS, there was a company that sold a SSD based NAS solution. Had arrays from ~1-a few Tbytes that were all SSD. Probably cost as much as a small island though.
 
Sure. A Sun Thumper is spec'ed at 1GB/s disk-to-network (or 2 memory-to-network), and if you glom a bunch together with other Sun stuff, you get the Sun Streaming System, 640 gigabits of streaming media capacity. They're remarkably affordable - on sale for $24k for 24 terabytes until May 7. That's a dollar a gigabyte, which is a figure you're not likely to beat for that kind of performance.
 
How many clients are we talking about? If just a few, it's actually pretty easy. If you're talking about a few dozen then the work gets harder and a LOT more expensive.

A half-dozen high-end 7200RPM SATA drives in RAID 5 (3Ware or Areca) will be able to move more than 100MB/s of data assuming that you have a pair of bonded Gig-E NICs with TOE (and an appropriate switch).

If you're looking to have >100MB/s total over a few dozen connections then you should be looking at 15K SCSI drives and a lot of them...
 
That sort of performance over FTP is not hard; a number of systems can do that if you design them properly (avoiding PCI bus, not skimping on CPU performance, picking the right FTP implementation, etc.).

Windows file transfer / SMB is another matter, and it's hard to get a setup that can do that over SMB. But it's not very hard to do with Vista on both ends, and it'll be even better when (a) Vista and its drivers are stable (b) Longhorn server is released (c) Linux SMB 2.0 support is finished & stable & fast.

Minimum cost I'd put around $400 for each base system + minimum of $150 for an add-on storage controller + drives (minimum of 3 drives) + OS. It's a little easier if you go down to RAID 0, but that's not recommended (to say the least) on a file server.

Note also that NAS / file transfer is a two-sided problem -- you can't do file copies at this rate unless you have RAID on both ends, etc.
 
There is fierce competition among storage vendors that supply this type of mid-range performance.

I personally think Isilon has some slick products.
 
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