[KLUG Members] RE: alternate redundancy v. cost

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> Perhaps not as detailed or sophisticated an answer as some of our KLUG
> guru's, but . . .
> For my money, NAS is getting so cheap, so easy and so feature rich that to
> me it makes more and more sense to use Gigabit Ethernet to connect one set
> of boxes to run apps with Network Attached Storage to hold the files. To
> handle redundancy and availability you can get NAS in ATA/IDE UltraXXX,
> SATA, or SCSI in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, or 50, with hot spares and/or auto
> failover. Some NAS'es come setup to do NAS to NAS to tape backups that are
> pretty much plug and play. Most are tunable to your bandwidth.

I've looked into NAS too, it is an interesting situation.

(A) Many of these boxes are actually based on Open Source softeware,  which is a
plus.
(B) Many of those same boxes are running VERY antiquated versions of said
software (Samba 2.2.x, old kernels, etc...).

I've though about NAS alot,  but I'd recommend only doing it if you go with a
**BIG** name brand, or else I fear really crappy support, few or no updates,
and short product life cycles.  And a BIG name brand drives up the price.

Since most of the NAS boxes don't really offer any magic I still find it
prerferably to hunt down a Netfinity and stuff it full of drives.  Then at
least I know I'm going to have current software and working integration.

And watch the drives in these things.  In some ATA units I've seen 5,400 RPM
drives (like in a laptop) these don't belong in a server.  Spindle speed has a
real effect on latency, for ATA you should have 7200RPM (ATA doesn't seem to go
any higher yet) and for SCSI you can get 10000RPM drives.