Cheap NAS

[fatbear]

1. Can someone recommend a cheap rackmount NAS solution (~1TB)? It will need to interoperate with my LAMP system.

2. Can my LAMP system transparently use the filespace on a NAS device? For example, if could I create a link such as:

cd /home/domain.com/www/htdocs
ln -s <pathToNAS> media
so that large amounts of image, audio, and video data would live on the NAS device, but as far as the end-user is concerned, all they would need to do is to ftp to the /www/htdocs/media folder to add new media content (which would then be stored on the NAS device).

Please feel free to educate me on how this can all work. And, like the first item above says--it's gotta be inexpensive. With 250GB SATA drives (e.g., Western Digital Caviar SE16) costing under $100, I just can't see spending $3,000 to house 4 or 8 of them. And, if you can point me off to websites where I can buy a solution, please include that!

[tranz]

You will need to spend at least $1000 storage just isnt storage. If you want to do it that way. Get a 4U tower and toss in some of those drives and mount them.

What is it that your looking to accomplish? Additional storage? Backup, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity etc?

What your trying to do will dictate what you need to deploy and thus your costs.

Some Links that might help:
http://www.iomega.com/direct/products/family.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=27327089&ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=63191&bmUID=1140748106976

http://coraid.com/

http://www.dnfstorage.com/products.asp/section/Product~Categories/category/Network%20Attached%20Storage/options/Linux/show/all


I have a vast background in design, development and deployment of various storage solutions from 1TB to 144+TB let me know if I can be of any further help.

[fatbear]

The main thing I'm trying to accomplish is to provide shared storage that each of my servers can use by mounting into the storage server. The storage server will contain mostly video data that the various hosting servers can reference.

Here's what I have right now for various other needs:

Fault Tolerance - Servers work in pairs, each customer account is identically placed on 2 servers. If one server goes down, at least the other server has the contents. What I don't have figured out properly is how the other server will pick up 100% of the customer traffic requests (dns, web, etc.). I could probably benefit from someone's knowledge here. Please feel free to respond with any URLs or advice. Each server costs me about $1600, so this is inexpensive redundancy.

Backup - Each customer account (database and files) and important system files are archived as incremental backups for 1 month. The backups themselves are part of the fault tolerance consideration above. Because I use two physically-separate server locations, for me this amounts to my off-site backup solution.

I did look at some of the storage solutions from the links you provided and the prices are just too high. For example, $3800 for a 640GB storage server, $6800 for a 1.6TB storage server. Yikes! The prices just don't make sense to me.

[tranz]

What most people fail to realize is that the storage aspect of any infrasturcture is the most important. Where the data sits in the end is what counts. Dont get me wroing the steps to getting it there are also important but the end is what counts.

What you could do on a cheap is get a tower somewhere, slap in some SATA drives and go from there. What you would need is software to assist you in management. Look at www.acronis.com and their true image solution.

Most of the time a dedicated storage solution IS going to be expensive. People fail to see what lies behind just the drives. Most people see prices for SATA drives, figure they can go to CompUSA or Frys and build a storage solution. Not so.

The software to manage and virtualize the storage is what gets expensive.

Now, I can wait for someone to post use Rsync or a raid. That isnt a viable solution in your case for a number of reasons.

What were you looking to spend on this anyways? I can tell you that for the sixe you want your not going to come away for less then $1500 or so.

[tranz]

Also looking at your need for a solution that will basicly re-route traffic incase a server fails. This will run you a fair amount. Why? You will have to have an appliance at both ends to monitor eachother. If one fails the other picks up the slack. When the first one comes back online, unit 2 then reverts all traffic back to one. But, you would then have to mirror the data on server to back to one if anything had changed. Then start the process all over again.

Your asking the right questions and its great to see someone that believes in their business and clients enough to even exlpore the idea of off-site and server fail over solutions. What keeps most people out of doing anything is the cost.

An example of the appliacne I was talking about is www.fatpipeinc.com and their WARP. If you have two of them they will do exactly as I described. How much? About $7500 each.

Any more questions let me know. I will be traviling from Orlando to San Jose, CA this evening at 7pm so I might not be able to respond back quickly.

[fatbear]

Thanks for the quick feedback. Right now, the configuration I have does give me the peace of mind with respect to most of our needs. Each pair of servers within a facility has all of the customer data on it... but the catch is how frequently the data are copied from one to the other. Right now, that interval is 30 minutes... less than perfect, but good nonetheless. The other catch is that if one server were to go down, I'd need to do some quick dns reconfiguring so that all traffic would be handled by the surviving server. Again, some time could be lost here.

So, because of these worries, I'm looking to improve the configuration. Perhaps putting a router in front of the servers would handle better the dns issues... on failure, I'd just change the router. So, I think I'm close right now to a solution that gives me fault tolerance and backup capabilities without any real outlay of money (other than the router). And, my need for storage is just for the video and other large data files that customers may need to store. If the additional storage is Raid 1, then there is some safety. And, if I get 2 such devices and mirror them (just like I do with the servers themselves), this would give me all of the safety I think I need. Because of the mirroring, I suppose I could even get by without the Raid1. So, all I really need is some storage that can be mounted in my server's /etc/fstab. And, I just want that storage to be as inexpensive as possible because my existing solution is really more than adequate.

Lastly, as for price, I figured the cost of drives plus around $500 for the enclosure would be nice... but, whatever reality is, I'll deal with it. The NAS web pages I've seen so far though only seem to advertise prices of $2000 and up--clearly they're either looking to provide more than I need, or are looking for purchasers who aren't as price conscious as I am. All I need is nfs mountable storage.

[Quantact-Tim]

NAS is pretty easy to build now.
You can buy a 4U, 5 250GB SATA drives, and a sata adapter card, and get a quick Software Raid 5 NAS.

Its tolerant of a disk failure, and can use an old motherboard/cpu/ram you have sitting around.

On the cheap, with smaller drives, I'd say you could put one together for about $500.

Here is what I found on pricewatch.com

$65.00 1 x 4U case
$19.00 1 x 450W atx ps
$104.00 1 x MB/Celeron/256M Ram Combo
$315.00 5 x 250G sata drives
$57.00 1 x Promise Sata 300 tx4 adapter
$0.00 1 x Centos 4.3 cdrom set download
------------------------------------------------
$560.00

Not bad for 1000G NAS, with raid 5 redundancy.
It wouldnt fly performance wise, but it would give you
lots, and lots of space.

[jmickle]

Even better dude. Go to your boneyard and get all your old IDE hard drives on computers. Cluster them together using Freenas! (http://www.freenas.org)