Reply to: Wish I'd had one of these when my UPS cable popped out

[doodab]

Yeah me too, I want a SAN rather than NAS and whilst I've got it now rather cheaply in real terms, the power consumption is the main bugbear, the Apple Xserve/Raid solution I have now, two Xserves, SAN switch, Xserve RAID is as low power as it can be for an enterprise-ish SAN, it's still 700w....

Still, it's all remote access with LOM, so all can be powered up and down as needed, just doing a quick google, seems a 500w PC on 24/7 is about 25/30 quid a month, I can live with that tho it means my 4 quid a week home office claim is unrealistic lol!

If you need it you need it though.

I've looked at stuff like the HP P2000 or Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SANs to complement various the servers I've had but I've never been able to even vaguely justify the cost. It's not like they support really high IOPS, so if that's what you need a cheap commodity SSD is a far better bet, and on the capacity front the internal storage available has always been adequate for what I've actually needed to do. Of course another reason for it is to provide a shared disk for clustering FS but you can always set a server up as an iSCSI target for that, which is what I've ended up doing. I guess I am doing quite low end stuff really though, just dev environments and proving software configs and so on, so I'm not actually concerned that I'm not using "real" infrastructure.

The other thing with this stuff is the noise. It's OK if you have a dedicated space you can use as a machine room but sharing an office with it is a different kettle of fish.

I'd agree about the LOM though, once you get used to it it's hard to go back to self built "servers"

[stek]

I've never really seen the point of spending money on a dedicated high end NAS box as they are quite expensive and a "real" server box seems to give far more bang for the buck.

I can see why people by the more basic £2-300 consumer ones, although personally I'd be inclined to go down the "real" server route even for this as I prefer the idea of commodity hardware I can upgrade and fix myself. I suppose that is my inner geek talking.

Yeah me too, I want a SAN rather than NAS and whilst I've got it now rather cheaply in real terms, the power consumption is the main bugbear, the Apple Xserve/Raid solution I have now, two Xserves, SAN switch, Xserve RAID is as low power as it can be for an enterprise-ish SAN, it's still 700w....

Still, it's all remote access with LOM, so all can be powered up and down as needed, just doing a quick google, seems a 500w PC on 24/7 is about 25/30 quid a month, I can live with that tho it means my 4 quid a week home office claim is unrealistic lol!

[doodab]

I've never really seen the point of spending money on a dedicated high end NAS box as they are quite expensive and a "real" server box seems to give far more bang for the buck.

I can see why people by the more basic £2-300 consumer ones, although personally I'd be inclined to go down the "real" server route even for this as I prefer the idea of commodity hardware I can upgrade and fix myself. I suppose that is my inner geek talking.

[stek]

I use my SAN/NAS tinkerings as a stop-gap, the real storage is on Crashplan, and it works cos I deleted a whole VM recently and got it back from the cloud no problem.

Costs me about £12 a month, unlimited storage, unlimited hosts, just you can't rsync, and you can't use NAS, unless you fudge it to run headless on the QNAP, which it never did for me, hence my disillusionment with the whole low-power NAS scene!

[doodab]

If you're not storing offsite and using a proper backup system, you're kidding yourself anyway IMHO. RAID is fine for disk redundancy, but that's where its usefulness stops.

+1. For most people backing up direct to external disk or the cloud makes sense. It's not a sexy gadget though so they don't do it.

[OwlHoot]

If you're not storing offsite and using a proper backup system, you're kidding yourself anyway IMHO. RAID is fine for disk redundancy, but that's where its usefulness stops.

Very true.

[vwdan]

If you're not storing offsite and using a proper backup system, you're kidding yourself anyway IMHO. RAID is fine for disk redundancy, but that's where its usefulness stops.

[scooterscot]

There's no 32TB Apple Time Capsule/machine yet lol!

I'm an Apple head, but the only time I used time machine to restore, it lost my iTunes stuff, so I don't trust it now....

I could not conceive needing 23TB, at least not in my business. We've a 3TB machine that serves three computers in the house. Backups are usually around the last six months. Kept in a separate building too, so even of my equipment is stolen it's not the end of days.

[stek]

Would this have happened with an apple time machine? Just asking like.

There's no 32TB Apple Time Capsule/machine yet lol!

I'm an Apple head, but the only time I used time machine to restore, it lost my iTunes stuff, so I don't trust it now....

[scooterscot]

Would this have happened with an apple time machine? Just asking like.

[stek]

Another minus for the QNAP, although it's had the red status light on for ages, it tells me all four disks are good, so I've migrated it all off, pulled out the 2tb disks for the Xserves, one is dead, won't even spin up.

This is what scares me about this commodity stuff, and therefore why I prefer cast-off enterprise stuff despite the power hit....

But I'm a geek!

[OwlHoot]

Like this?

Yes, I meant to mention that, but wasn't sure what it was called. Power plug retaining clip?

I've half a mind to try and make a couple myself and glue them to the backs of my NAS and UPS.

[stek]

Like this?

[stek]

Just been through the crap in my data centre/shed, in my attempts to find the perfect home NAS/SAN I've got;

1. QNAP TS-412, too slow, gave up with it, 29w

2. NEC SX1500 arrays - just for the disks really, used them on 3. below

3. Sun A5200 JBOD, built like a tank, 22 300GB FC-AL drives, obviously power hungry, 650w

4. IBM DS3400, EXP3000 and TS3310 got for free, not played with yet.

5. Sun T3+ fibre RAID array, small, light(ish) limit on LUN size

6. Apple Xserve RAID array, 10.5TB, along with the Xserve to control it, 400/500w


Leaning toward 6. at the moment, still a lot of juice, can remote power up/down, but to be honest I'm finding the lower powered QNAP Arms and such for me a bit slow to respond etc and frequent hangs on the GUI, and sometimes just can't ssh, needing a pressing of the tit.

You can tell my partner has been away for three weeks now can't you! Wonder if she's gonna come back? Actually the reason I've gone data-paranoid is because I lost her Hamburg pics from 2005.....

So, full TSM solution with storage pools on fibre SAN, 24-slot TS3310 tape backup with Crashplan is the bare minimum for me

[stek]

Before I bought a UPS, I was working from home office for 7 years for 3 clients and had a 4 server setup plugged into house mains. One day our cleaners plugged in an iron and blew the fuses. I lost two servers that cost me several days to get backup to speed, and lost a days worth of data.

Since then I have a separate ring main with RCD(?) for the office, a 3000AV UPS, Carbonite cloud backup and a 12 Tb NAS drive.

Oh, and now have moved all server stuff to cloud.

When I was at British Rail, long time ago, we had regular 7:30am outages on the signalling system in one of the boxes at Lime Street, turned out if was the cleaner unplugging the main server that controlled it for her hoover. Not only that, the 'server' was an 8086XT.....