Idea: State of NAS

[Biren78]

Patrick --- here’s an idea for an article, others chime in if you want: Do a state of the homebuilt NAS industry piece. I read older docs by you and saw EON ZFS which is pretty nascent now. Here’s my list:

OpenFiler seems to have stalled.
FreeNAS is alive
Amahi is alive and kicking
Napp-it is popular
unRAID seems less popular
EON ZFS went dormant
zfsguru is one that I think was popular awhile back but keeps seeing pushed releases: State of the Project [2013]
Nexenta CE seems like it has some move behind it.
ZFS on Linux seems popular but no web front end

Any I missed?

You can put more words around it, but would be a good resource for the casual builder.

 

[Mike]

How much of a web gui do you need to keep your disks spinnin'?

 

[Eric]

I've had very bad results with FreeNAS, timeouts and disconnects were my main problems when trying to keep a raid 1 nas up 24x7.

 

[Patrick]

I like this idea. May write it over the weekend. (Worked 45 hours Monday -> Wednesday.)

Any other thoughts/ projects to highlight?

 

[awedio]

I like this idea. May write it over the weekend. (Worked 45 hours Monday -> Wednesday.)

Any other thoughts/ projects to highlight?

Maybe a ZFS vs SMB3/Storage Spaces performance pro's & cons?

 

[BThunderW]

My 2 cents:

I've been spending a lot of time looking at the various NAS/SAN solutions. I have 4 storage servers (2xVM SAN, Backup, Media) that have gone through quite a few NAS/SAN OS's over the years. Currently settled on NexentaStor Community as it seems to be the most stable, feature rich implementation of ZFS. Ever since tasting the ZFS goodness, it's hard to go back to software or hardware RAID.

Some thoughts:

FreeNas 9:

Pros:
* Easy to install
* Comprehensive UI
* ZFS

Cons:
* Horrible CIFS performance.
* Doesn't deal with failed (slow, unresponsive) disks very well
* Not so great NFS performance

OpenFiler:
Pros:
* Great/Comprehensive UI
* Great CIFS performance
* Stable

Cons:
* Dead
* No iSCSI MPIO
* No ZFS

Windows Storage Server 2012:
Pros:
* Familiar Windows UI
* SMB 3.0 (Win 2012/Win 8 only for now tho)

Cons:
* Bad NFS performance.
* Horrible to configure anonymous SMB access
* No ZFS
* No SSD Acceleration
* Storage Spaces slow
* No Software RAID-10 Edit: I was informed that Storage Spaces does in fact support RAID-10 (or more appropriately RAID-01/E1)
* Raid-5 Takes Ages to rebuild

Napp-It
Pros:
* ZFS
* UI Driven Config
* Works with many Solaris based distributions

Cons:
* Still very much like an Alpha version of software.
* A lot of configuration still requires manual editing of files.
* Not very intuitive
* No built in email notifications on failures


NexentaStor Community
Pros:
* ZFS
* Stellar NFS/CIFS/iSCSI performance
* Handles disk failures well
* Good email health notifications
* Stable

Cons:
* Requires registration and serial
* 18TB usable limit (new license terms coming out that changes that to 18TB RAW limit).
* Anonymous CIFS requires some hacking
* Limited hardware support (no eSata)
* Boot array can not be managed via GUI.
* Very basic community support.

More thoughts:
Seems that FreeBSD NAS/SAN solutions have major CIFS performance issues. I want to try Nas4Free but I'm worried it'll have the same CIFS issue.

Want To Try:
unRAID - Single disk performance is sort of a turn-off
XPEnology/Synology - Seems to lack hardware support

 

[TangoWhiskey9]

Patrick - I think these guys have just told you ->> add Windows in there

 

[Mike]

Time for some more BTRFS love.

 

[Aluminum]

Don't forget some of the solaris derivatives, some are still pretty active.

Another personal thing I'd like to see is a quick go over the mainsteam hardware support. (not beta or bleeding edge, current stable releases only) It will be a free pass for windows which isn't really fair because windows is terrible, but there are still a lot of differences in the *nix world.

Some of them have been sliding pretty far behind the curve, which makes spec'ing out a new build for them a pain in the ass when all the retail stuff has unsupported NICs and HBAs.

FreeNAS for example tracks FreeBSD which is already one of the slower OSes when it comes to updating drivers, and on top of that they stay back an entire major release and are still months behind the current one. (8.3 versus 8.4 maintenance, 9.1 is current stable)



random rant: If you ignore the dead projects, no 'community' unix/linux project is as bad at HCL as pfsense lol! (FreeBSD 8.1 in 2013 = SIGH, and 2.1 which might land in 2014 if I'm lucky is only 8.3) That community is obsessed with using the cheapest/oldest/free hardware they can find, NAS/SAN enthusiasts are definitely more interested in recent stuff.

 

[Biren78]

I like the compatibility idea but this will quickly become a 100,000 word novel.

As for Windows - I was thinking more about *NIX based OS.

Maybe a series?

 

[Biren78]

Hey forgot - pfsense - I'd love to see a monster machine with this. 10 gig nics or IB. Wonder if they have IB + PFsense?

Agreed they are way behind.

 

[gea]

Napp-It
Pros:
* ZFS
* UI Driven Config
* Works with many Solaris based distributions

Cons:
* Still very much like an Alpha version of software.
* A lot of configuration still requires manual editing of files.
* Not very intuitive
* No built in email notifications on failures

Only a clarification
- napp-it is a 0.9 release, not yet feature complete but ZFS core features are within since 4 years and I declare them stable
- Base NAS/SAN/ZFS management is GUI only, some features like driver optimizations or force 4k disks needs editing files (within the GUI)
- Email notification is build in since years
Only Googlemail (TLS) needs a manual setup to install the needed Perl modules

 

[Patrick]

Looks like I'm far behind. Just added this one to the content plan/ backlog.