time to come up with a storage solution

[alphabanks]

Guys I have been putting this off for a while I need to go ahead and migrate away from my Perc 5i. Also I started another thread on how my Perc is having a caching problem. So with that said I will start out with my hardware I am going to be using 8 WD red 2TB drives with an IBM M1015 controller flashed to an HBA. My requirements are as follows I will need cifs/samba for regular file shares which will be our movie collection that streams to our Windows 7 media PC's I will need ISCSI and NFS for my Vmware boxes. Also I will need for the solution to be Active Directory integrated. So the way I see it is I have a few options I can look at a storage appliance or I can try to do all of this via a Linux box. I can also look at some appliance out there being NAS4Free, FreeNas, or OpenIndiana. The hardware will be one of my systems it is a cor2duo 1.86 and has 8 gigs of ram. I've also thought about running this on one of my ESXI servers my cpu for those server are Intel Xeon E1230. So guys what do you think should I go appliance or Linux and should I do VM or bare metal? Also I will be using software raid 5 be it via Linux or ZFS.

 

[kac77]

You want ECC. However you get there hardware-wise is up to you.

I would go in order:

1. Unix/Solaris derivative
2. Linux

The reason why is because of the AD integration. Both can be added to a Windows domain but only Solaris/Unix derivatives support all of the Windows ACL's.

 

[ashman]

Personally, I would just buy a Qnap or Synology and be done with it, but they are costly. If you have the time to cobble something together that fits your needs, then DIY is the way to go for you.