Good High Performing Enterprise NAS w/ 10GB & ability to have 10TB+

[dba]

Latency does limit your peak bandwidth unless you are doing pure large block sequential work.

I suppose if you look at it from the perspective of the NFS server, with 100 clients, the latency could be additive as far as buffer fill (which could add latency). Once buffers congest packets drop and big mess with delayed ack/windowed protocols.

Plus the power of base-T is ridiculous

I don't know about ridiculous, at least not with current generation products. The Intel X520-SR2 (fiber card) is 6.9 watts while Intel X540-T2 (BaseT card) is 9.8 watts, and while I'm not sure about the Intel, most 10GBaseT solutions have a low-power mode for short cables that saves even more power.

I'm still a fan of SFP+ myself, but I have to admit that BaseT is now a quite viable solution, and an Ethernet cable is just so darn familiar to everyone, and therefore appealing.

 

[mrkrad]

That depends on what fiber you are using(optics). Obviously LR 40KM optics will drain more than short haul.

Remember the X520 is a pretty ancient design - And yeah that EEE for base-T - man that causes a lot of trouble. We had a switch flap on low power mode. Intel and (others) didn't agree quite on the EEE mode so it would just randomly flap until you disabled Energy Efficient Ethernet.

Sad thing is the severe overpricing of networking. The ratio of new price to used market value clearly indicates price-shenanigans!

 

[Stokkes]

EMC Isilon. No maintenance, no configuration, 1 big file system (with NFS, SMB, iSCSI, CIFS, FTP, WWW). We put one in around December 2010 and have done 0 maintenance except to upgrade the OS (not necessary, but very easy as it's done using rolling upgrades) and to modify a few quotas (which can easily be done by Helpdesk people). Everything is configured via a Web interface.

This is high quality stuff, better than NetApp IMO (We considered Netapp back then, but you almost need an expert to configure and expandability isn't obvious).

 

[smccloud]

We ended up quoting an Infortrend EonNAS 3016RT with Base-T 10GbE, 32GB RAM per node, 4 SSDs for caching & 12 Spinning SAS disks.