Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?
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@BRRABill said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
Well the head node I would assume isn't a PC, but instead a VM (as JB mentioned before) but maybe that's just crazy on our parts as well.
Well, normally that's not what is assumed but that's fine. If that's the case, then just assign that VM enough storage and you have nothing to worry about.
When you say assign it storage ... you mean storage in the Aetherstore store, correct?
More importantly - why doesn't Scott assume that the head node would be on a VM? Where would he assume it's installed?
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@JaredBusch said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
Question - how many head nodes can you have for an AetherStore array? if it's only one, would you really install it on a PC out in userland?
One, and you are damned right, I do not want it in userland.
Yeah, just one. Being a PC is fine. But you don't want it to be someone's desktop unless that's its function. A bit use case of AetherStore is for individual users who need their own expanded storage.
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@BRRABill said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
Well the head node I would assume isn't a PC, but instead a VM (as JB mentioned before) but maybe that's just crazy on our parts as well.
Well, normally that's not what is assumed but that's fine. If that's the case, then just assign that VM enough storage and you have nothing to worry about.
When you say assign it storage ... you mean storage in the Aetherstore store, correct?
More importantly - why doesn't Scott assume that the head node would be on a VM? Where would he assume it's installed?
Directly on whatever the backup head is if you are doing backups. Or directly where you will consider the data in most cases.
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@BRRABill said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
Well the head node I would assume isn't a PC, but instead a VM (as JB mentioned before) but maybe that's just crazy on our parts as well.
Well, normally that's not what is assumed but that's fine. If that's the case, then just assign that VM enough storage and you have nothing to worry about.
When you say assign it storage ... you mean storage in the Aetherstore store, correct?
No, storage to the VM.
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@scottalanmiller said
When you say assign it storage ... you mean storage in the Aetherstore store, correct?
No, storage to the VM.
But not a requirement. No reason you couldn't install the Aetherstore core (to use to store data) on 10 machines, and the head on a VM with NO storage dedicated to it, right?
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@BRRABill said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@scottalanmiller said
When you say assign it storage ... you mean storage in the Aetherstore store, correct?
No, storage to the VM.
But not a requirement. No reason you couldn't install the Aetherstore core (to use to store data) on 10 machines, and the head on a VM with NO storage dedicated to it, right?
Correct. The use of local storage on the head is purely for performance considerations.
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@scottalanmiller do you know if AetherStore ( - what's Rob's or AetherStore's handle here?) is considering making a Linux based appliance for the head unit?
That seems like a natural thing here. Unless you think it's crazy to not just have the head unit software installed directly on the Backup Server itself?
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@scottalanmiller do you know if AetherStore ( - what's Rob's or AetherStore's handle here?) is considering making a Linux based appliance for the head unit?
Appliance? I don't think that that is on the radar. I've heard nothing about that and as I've proposed it, I likely would have heard. It runs on Linux, it's just not available for public consumption as it doesn't fit the target audience.
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
That seems like a natural thing here. Unless you think it's crazy to not just have the head unit software installed directly on the Backup Server itself?
I would generally think that that is crazy
Seriously, though, most of the time you would install there. There are cases where you would not BUT think of it this way.....Mount Directly It's like having a DAS chassis hooked directly to the backup server. It's all local disks, nothing extra.
Mount Remotely Now there is an extra network connection in between with all of the overhead of SMB and the need to run an extra Windows machine just for that and all that complication.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
That seems like a natural thing here. Unless you think it's crazy to not just have the head unit software installed directly on the Backup Server itself?
I would generally think that that is crazy
Seriously, though, most of the time you would install there. There are cases where you would not BUT think of it this way.....Mount Directly It's like having a DAS chassis hooked directly to the backup server. It's all local disks, nothing extra.
Mount Remotely Now there is an extra network connection in between with all of the overhead of SMB and the need to run an extra Windows machine just for that and all that complication.
Well, in the case of backup or regular file shares - I guess I see your point. Though, I don't see that in either case that you'd expect there to be any local storage to those VMs as a default.
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@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@Dashrender said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
That seems like a natural thing here. Unless you think it's crazy to not just have the head unit software installed directly on the Backup Server itself?
I would generally think that that is crazy
Seriously, though, most of the time you would install there. There are cases where you would not BUT think of it this way.....Mount Directly It's like having a DAS chassis hooked directly to the backup server. It's all local disks, nothing extra.
Mount Remotely Now there is an extra network connection in between with all of the overhead of SMB and the need to run an extra Windows machine just for that and all that complication.
Well, in the case of backup or regular file shares - I guess I see your point. Though, I don't see that in either case that you'd expect there to be any local storage to those VMs as a default.
Depends on your architecture. In a lot of cases I think that you would (and also, in a lot you would not.) There are some pretty big benefits to having a huge local non-redundant drive(s) for speed and letting AetherStore handle the redundancy.
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Does anyone have numbers on the performance hit that a computer on which Aetherstore is running (i.e. part of its storage is part of an Aetherstore pool) takes on average? I did not see that mentioned here and wondered if an end user might notice any kind of difference.
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@NetworkNerd said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
Does anyone have numbers on the performance hit that a computer on which Aetherstore is running (i.e. part of its storage is part of an Aetherstore pool) takes on average? I did not see that mentioned here and wondered if an end user might notice any kind of difference.
No numbers, but I can tell you it is negligible. Users never noticed during the beta I tested with.
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@NetworkNerd said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
Does anyone have numbers on the performance hit that a computer on which Aetherstore is running (i.e. part of its storage is part of an Aetherstore pool) takes on average?
I don't have a copy of them but I hosed the test VMs I was using and AetherStore never came up as a resource consideration.
What I would dearly love to know is, what is the read/write performance in version 2 now.
I'm seeing a lot of "head node" talk, what do you mean head node? Last I looked there was no such thing as a head node in AetherStore, unless the design has completely changed.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
I'm seeing a lot of "head node" talk, what do you mean head node? Last I looked there was no such thing as a head node in AetherStore, unless the design has completely changed.
Head node is the wrong term probably, but it is the one with the SAN head on it. Only one node (which may or may not have local storage) in an AetherNet pool can be mounted concurrently. That's the one that we mean as the head node - the one from which the storage is accessable.
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Does anyone know of an open source implementation or alternative to this? Just a distributed file system?
It looks like a good utility but I'm not sure I'm comfortable paying a company to manage tiered storage on my own hardware if I can do the same myself.
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@aidan_walsh There are a bunch of DFS's in existence, but are you really capable of deploying them to your working fleet of windows PC's?
One of the key things with AetherStore is you're supported, and the cost is negligible compared to the weeks or months of setting up your own implementation.
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@DustinB3403 said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
@aidan_walsh There are a bunch of DFS's in existence, but are you really capable of deploying them to your working fleet of windows PC's?
One of the key things with AetherStore is you're supported, and the cost is negligible compared to the weeks or months of setting up your own implementation.
Seems crazy that list doesn't have GFS2.
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@stacksofplates yeah... idk why it's not there. Is GFS2 only available on RedHat?
Seems odd that it would be....
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@aidan_walsh said in Why Choose AetherStore Over a NAS?:
Does anyone know of an open source implementation or alternative to this? Just a distributed file system?
It looks like a good utility but I'm not sure I'm comfortable paying a company to manage tiered storage on my own hardware if I can do the same myself.
Things like Gluster can do this. But you'll have to spend a lot of time building this out. You'll likely want to build a VM on top of each box, put Gluster on that and then encrypt the VM store (maybe not in that order). But I don't know of any technology that's designed to handle the "it can drop off the network" issues that AetherStore tackles.
You can make stuff that kind of does this, but nothing off of the shelf is designed for this use case. So there is a lot of work that you'll have to do on your own to get it to work.
