NAS for Mac environment
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Got it. Let me get the pricing tomorrow from vendors on Synology, and see how this goes. But this post was worth, got couple of things cleared and learned something new. Thank you @scottalanmiller
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If you have the overflowing pockets, a good thing to do is to buy these three devices:
- Drobo B800i
- Drobo B800fs or 5n
- Netgear SC101
The B800i and the SC101 are pure SANs. No hint of NAS functionality whatsoever. The B800fs is a pure NAS, no SAN functionality whatsoever. Playing with these devices is great because the two Drobos help to teach what a Synology or a ReadyNAS would be like if it was torn apart into two different units - because it is difficult to understand what is NAS and what is SAN when nearly every devices mashes them together into a single box all of the time. Forcing you to see them discretely is very educational.
The SC101 is really hand for understanding just how little a SAN can be and how little the name means. The SC101 has no RAID, no controller even, is $99 and completely useless - yet it is a complete SAN by any definition. It is the disk array for a block storage network. Seeing SAN stripped to the core is very informative in helping to dissolve misassociations that are so often made with SAN.
Technically any USB external hard drive is a SAN too, but this is a little too much unknown networking for most people to get the same value out of seeing one as they do out of an SC101 since it uses TCP/IP networking.
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And being majority of MAC machines, i think it makes more sense to have a MAC mini server, where logins can be centralised, for file sharing and time machine backup for some key mgmnt users. The OSX server also mentions about XSAN http://www.apple.com/ae/osx/server/features/#xsan
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@Ambarishrh said:
And being majority of MAC machines, i think it makes more sense to have a MAC mini server, where logins can be centralised, for file sharing and time machine backup for some key mgmnt users. The OSX server also mentions about XSAN http://www.apple.com/ae/osx/server/features/#xsan
Yes, using a SAN means that there are no logins at all. The entire concept of a login doesn't exist on a SAN
A SAN is just a disk drive that is "far away", nothing more. You don't log into disk drives, you just read them.Any NAS will centralize accounts too. That you use a Mac won't add that functionality, but might make it easier to manage.
You can do Timemachine just as easily with other devices too. That's not Apple specific.
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@Ambarishrh said:
The OSX server also mentions about XSAN http://www.apple.com/ae/osx/server/features/#xsan
XSAN is a competitor with SAN-MP. It's a clustered file system that Apple provides. It is very, very unlikely that you want anything to do with this. Especially as it requires fibre channel to the desktop!!
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I basically just wrote the Wikipedia entry without having looked. Here is the Wikipedia wording of what I just said: "Xsan is Apple Inc.'s storage area network (SAN) or clustered file system for Mac OS X. Xsan enables multiple Mac desktop and Xserve systems to access shared block storage over a Fibre Channel network."
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@scottalanmiller said:
If you have the overflowing pockets, a good thing to do is to buy these three devices:
- Drobo B800i
So if I go with a B800i and a MAC mini, that would be a good option for this setup. On the Drobo site, it says "The Drobo B800i changes that by introducing zero-click iSCSI configuration for both Windows and Mac OS X servers.
With an iSCSI SAN, centralized storage is provided to each server over a high-speed Gigabit Ethernet network where it can be allocated or expanded instantaneously"
So once the DROBO is mounted on the MAC, then that can be shared by switching on the file sharing on the mac server. Hope this is a good path to go
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On the "Choose the right DROBO for you section" i just checked
When you select the second option and then 2-5TB you get the Drobo 5D, when you choose the 3rd option with 2-5TB takes me the one you said Drobo B800i
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@Ambarishrh said:
So if I go with a B800i and a MAC mini, that would be a good option for this setup. On the Drobo site, it says "The Drobo B800i changes that by introducing zero-click iSCSI configuration for both Windows and Mac OS X servers.
The B800i and the B1200i are both super duper simple to setup for iSCSI. I mean seriously easy. The B800i is a nice little unit and you can bug @art_of_shred or @Mike-Ralston to hook you up with access to a live one as the NTG Lab runs one with 12TB on it. It's not super fast and does not have a lot of redundancy and whatnot so you need to be careful where you use it.
But if you want ease of use, nothing touching Drobo for SAN.
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@Ambarishrh said:
On the "Choose the right DROBO for you section" i just checked
When you select the second option and then 2-5TB you get the Drobo 5D, when you choose the 3rd option with 2-5TB takes me the one you said Drobo B800i
The B800i is 8 bays, rack mount, no cache.
The 5N is 5 bays, desk mount, single SSD cache option.
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The B1200i is 12 bays, with an option 9 spinning rust with 3 SSD cache with lots of redundancy and rack mount.
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The current problems i needed to solve is the slow access. I think enabling backup of the data to their existing NAS drive could add as a second copy in case something goes wrong with the new one.
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@Ambarishrh said:
So once the DROBO is mounted on the MAC, then that can be shared by switching on the file sharing on the mac server. Hope this is a good path to go
Correct. The Drobo mounts on the Mac like you added a local drive. Then you share it just like making any file share.
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tomorrow would be quite a lot of calls to vendors on pricing!
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This seems to be a good option giving me a usable space of 5TB with dual disk redundancy.
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Just listing what I find useful for me, might be a good starting point for someone else in the future.
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Keep in mind that the B800i is SATA only. SAS drive options do not exist until you use the B1200i.
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We use the B800i behind our XenServer in the lab. Works really well. We are on RAID 6 (dual redundancy as they call it) of course.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Ambarishrh said:
How does it work with MAC?
Macs talk the same protocols as everyone else. SMB first, NFS second and AFP deprecated but included. There is no concept of "storage for Mac" anymore. That's an old idea.
The only thing to be aware of is the Finder issue and that plagues all non-Mac native storage equally.
This is good to know...
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@scottalanmiller said:
- Give up on file sharing and move to SAN + clustered filesystem like SAN-MP so that you are using a Mac-managed HFS+ system.
I can only imagine how expensive that would be!
