NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Has anyone used the Panasas pNFS gear? We're looking at it for some HPC applications.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2008 03:19

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 00:40

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Shalrath posted:

My current setup is about 5 drives concatencated through LVM for a total of about 800 GB. (which now feels very outmoded, since geeks.com is having a sale of 750 Barracudas for 124$) Nothing special really. I havent bothered with any sort of mirroring or striping since most of the drives are different sizes.

Just so you're aware, if you lose the drive that your FS's inode table is on, all of the data on the other drives is effectively orphaned, regardless of whether the files themselves are contiguous or not. As above, it's no worse than losing a single 750GB drive, but it still sucks.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2008 06:43

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

teamdest posted:

So what's everyone's opinion on Server OS/Software nowadays? I'm having some aggravating problems w/ Solaris 11 that I honestly just don't feel like taking the time to debug without some kinda support, so I'm looking to swap out for something easier.

I'm pretty set on ZFS at this point, there's just nothing even coming close, so I seem my choices as:

1) Solaris 11 (zfs v31) - having weird, not-consistently-reproducible date/time software issues, napp-it is kind of a pain but I can put up with it I suppose.

2) OpenIndiana 151a5 (zfs tags system thing) - haven't heard much about this or how well it's working out, would still have to put up with napp-it.

3) Nas4Free - probably still going to have the FreeBSD-related CIFS speed issues that I've seen before

4) Freenas - not seeing an advantage here over Nas4Free, older zfs version, etc.

Am I missing anything? Is a life of OpenIndiana Hell my only option? At this point I might as well skip the whole napp-it thing and just do OpenIndiana + iSCSI and make my file server a CentOS VM like I used to use.

I think OpenIndiana is a questionable move at this point if you're not planning on using it as an iSCSI target. (COMSTAR still shines over the other FOSS alternatives.) Development on it is glacial, it doesn't (can't) really track upstream Solaris changes so there's no point in the ostensible Solaris compatibility anymore, and FreeBSD is already tracking (very quickly) all the pertinent ZFS code/fixes from Illumos because it's all CDDL. Unless you're trying to run some legacy Solaris application but don't want to license official Solaris, Illumos is a pretty silly path when the ZFS stuff is handled just as well by FreeBSD 9.1 and Samba 3.6+.

Once upon a time, FreeBSD support for ZFS was really wonky (especially for compression and deduplication), but those issues are basically dead now.

If you need a hand getting FreeBSD+Samba going, give me a PM and I'll shoot you over my configuration that has working AD integration and ZFS ACL support.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Oct 1, 2012

# ¿ Oct 1, 2012 01:53

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

teamdest posted:

Are the major FreeBSD + Samba speed problems resolved at this point? I honestly haven't been following it and I should be, but a major portion of the file server's usage is Windows shares and NFS to some VMs, with the 3rd major point being iSCSI (Comstar) target for the VM server, but since i'm running over 1gig Copper I doubt I'd take a hit moving that over to NFS, i'm just lazy and set in my ways.

We're actually using it for scientific computing (analyzing extremely high-resolution microscope images of mouse brains) and performance is really rather good. I'm not sure which speed problems you're referring to.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2012 02:56

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Mantle posted:

You guys with an N40L, are they powerful enough to run zfs with all its features? I played it safe when building a zfs box for my company and bought a full tower, but for a secondary machine I'd like to know what is the lower limit of hardware I could use.

ZFS loves RAM. You can get away with any low-end CPU as long as you're not doing inline dedupe/compression, but you need to max that out at 8 GB of RAM if you want any kind of decent performance.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2012 19:53

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

gggiiimmmppp posted:

Given the special snowflake nature of software RAID5 I don't know if I can expect an array produced by the AMD controller to be compatible with Intel controller. I've never been in this situation before, thus the question. I don't know if I should expect things to be compatible or proprietary.

Always assume RAID implementations to be proprietary until proven otherwise.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2012 05:31

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 00:40

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Jolan posted:

I just started using my QNAP TS412, and I can set up an iTunes server on it. Could someone enlighten me about what the difference would be between such an iTunes server and just putting my music in a folder and adding that folder in iTunes?

DAAP access from any of your other devices that speak it (Xbox, PS3, etc.) without your computer being on and having iTunes running. The term is kind of a misnomer, since it won't play any DRMed content.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 23:21

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