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I'm in the market for a sub-$1000 NAS solution for a small development/QA network. Needs to be reliable and something we won't worry about overnight, but does not need to be bulletproof/5 nines/what have you.

A few avenues we have explored are:

Anyone have any experience with those solutions or other recommendations in this space?

Clarifications

  • We are going to principally be hosting Hyper-V virtual machines to it.
  • 500gb should be more than enough disk space
  • Performance isn't a main concern, but it should be fast enough as to not cause the DEV/QA applications issues.
  • Looking at mainly iSCSI -- we are effectively replacing a 8xSAS drive internal array with this. NAS could come in handy in a pinch
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What are you trying to do with it? VMware or other virtualization? Simple file storage? How much disk space do you need? How many users will need to simultaneously access it? Are you concerned about performance? It might help to look over these charts if you are. Do you need NAS + iSCSI or just iSCSI? – Dave Jul 16 '10 at 17:15
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iSCSI is a SAN technology, not NAS. – Chris S♦ Jul 16 '10 at 17:24
a lot of the new nas servers support exposing volumes via iscsi along with nas volumes. – tony roth Jul 16 '10 at 17:29
Currently you shouldn't use nas to host your vhds, it can be done but is not supported. – tony roth Jul 16 '10 at 17:32
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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Openfiler works perfectly fine as ISCSI target with virtualized enviroments (VMware or Citrix Xen). However you will require good hardware to meet your expectations.

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Agreed. OpenFiler saved mi life in an installation where the supplier provided Win 2003 R2 for Storage as a SAN OS. Windows turned out useless and full of bugs. I wiped windows, installed OpenFiler and averything worked as advertised. – lrosa Jul 17 '10 at 8:32
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up vote 4 down vote

OpenFiler is pretty good for most people, if you can afford to then try to put it in a server with dual power-supplies, dual-NICs setup for failover and use RAID 1 or 10 - that would be pretty stable without going too far.

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