Cheap Homemade NAS

[scotte]

Hi,

I have an ML350 G6, which I have connected to two different NAS devices, 1 x Promise NAS & 1 x Iomega IX4-200D.

The promise NAS has 4 x 1Tb SATA drives installed and the Iomega NAS has 4 x 2TB SATA drives installed.

I am struggling with performance on boh of these devices and it can literally take 30-40 mins to deploy a 40Gb template to them. I'm assuming it's because the drives/spindles are too large and I think there only 72K RPM.

All my hardware is connected to a Cisco Gigabit switch and I have even aggregated two nics on my Iomega to increase throughput and enabled jumbo frames on my devices but nothing has improved.

I have a spare HP ML115 G5, which I could run a software NAS on i.e. OpenFiler, FreeNAS etc etc, do I need to buy expensive SSD drives in order to get better performance? Taking into consideration the ML115 only has 1 xGig NIC.

I'm just looking at creating a faster NAS device with the current hardware I have.

Any ideas appreciated.

Cheers

Scot

[FCG_DD]

Scot,

What if you take the network out of the equation?

Assuming you are using iSCSI...

Connected a pNIC from your ESXi server directly to the NIC on the ix-400, make sure Jumbo Frames are enabled on both the ix-400 and the iSCSI VMK.

If you are using NFS, I have an ix200 I was working with via NFS and it just does not work well. iSCSI on the ix-200 using Jumbo Frames is pretty decent (24GB template deployed in 10 minutes). My ix-200 is running 2 x 1 TB drives (7200 RPM).

[scotte]

Hi FCG_DD,

I am using both NFS & iSCSI on my Iomeg and get bad performance with both protocols, I haven't tried connecting them direcly to each other.

So our saying connect up a normal Cat5 cable to a pNic on my ESXi 5 host that's configured in a VMkernel port group to the physical nic on the Iomega device?

I'll have break the aggregated ncs and leave one of them connected to the switch for mgmt purposes, I'll give it a go.

Cheers

Scott

[FCG_DD]

This will take the network out of the equation, it may not solve the issue, but may help track it down.

Keep in mind that the IX series from iomega are not running the same OS as the PX series, the PX series is certified for vmWare (according to the iomega website)... I don't know if either one are on the official vmWare HCL. With that being said, my IX series works pretty well for what I need.

Let us know what happens, I'm curous to see what results you get.

[mcowger]

The IX is certified as well.  Both are on the VMware HCL.

That being said, its pretty clear you just dont have enough spindles.  Those things aren't intended to be speed demons.