Iomega's New Unix (Optional) NAS Appliance 201
Tora writes: "Zip disk maker Iomega
has released a sexy new 1U Network Attached
Storage server
with an option
for either Unix or Microsoft Windows as the OS.
Their previous NAS offering was Windows-only; it is nice to see
both OS options available, although they do not yet have pricing up
for the Windows version."
Iomega.. (Score:4, Flamebait)
Re:Iomega.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Iomega.. (Score:2)
Re:Iomega.. (Score:1)
Well, I was one of the people who modified it "troll" (obviously that will go away now that I'm posting this message.) What I really wanted to modify it was "irrelevant," which is close to "offtopic," except that I figured that it could be an attempt to get people to talk about something irrelevant, which would make it a troll.
All of this is based on my opinion that the idea that this product could suffer from the "click of death" is absurd. This a completely different product, and I highly doubt that iomega puts zip or jaz disks in it.
If the original claim had been "I hope it don't suffer from quality control problems such as the click of death" the situation would have been completely different. Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but I hate to see ignorance displayed, and if the post had ended up being modded to oblivion, the poster (oops, looks like that's you) would have been saved some embarrassment.
Re:Iomega.. (Score:2)
The "click of death" issue IS related to the iomega NAS appliance, in that it came from the same company, and said companies response to what came to be known as a serious design or manufacturing flaw turned many people away from trusting an iomega product in a critical role again.
Wouldn't you like to know, before purchasing a product from a company, that a previous product marketed for similar needs suffered a terrible defect? And even if the technology of the new product is dissimilar to that of the previous, wouldn't you like to know that companies customer service policy included such features as pretending the flaw didn't exist, refusing to issue RMA's on the defect, etc. ad nauseum?
Re:Iomega.. (Score:2)
Re:Iomega.. (Score:2)
Re:Iomega.. (Score:1)
CLICK OF DEATH [aol.com]
Re:Iomega.. (Score:2)
Good. (Score:2, Interesting)
You're paying royalties to Microsoft through the NAS manufacturer, since you're technically getting an custom OEM version of Windows 2000 to run the machine. Saving a little cash just makes it even sweeter.
Sorry Bill, I don't want to have to line your pocket on _every_ product I purchase.
Re:Good. (Score:1)
Re:Good. (Score:1)
Re:Good. (Score:4, Informative)
Snapshots and linux NAS (Score:3, Interesting)
Snapshots are the biggest way in which NetApp is much better. Raidzone supports it's own "snapshots", but it implements them with a series of gigantic find-based cron scripts that can (on a large filesystem) bring your NAS to it's knees, and it maintains them more like incremental backups than NetApp's snapshot concept.
Basically, each snapshot 'bucket' contains -only- files that have changed in the last time increment. If you delete a file that hasn't been changed in longer than the longest snapshot bucket, you lose. I'm not real thrilled with this, but don't have a better linux snapshot implementation without messing with the hardware or the kernel. Anyone know of anything more NetApp-like?
[My opinions are my own and no one else's]
lvm does snapshots (Score:2)
Re:FreeBSD has snapshots (Score:2)
cheers,
mike
Compaq (Score:2)
Re:Good. (Score:1)
Re:Good. (Score:1)
Re:Good. (Score:1)
Re:Good. (Score:2)
RAM is cheap, who cares.
Re:Good. (Score:2, Informative)
I can't imagine how dificult (read expensive) must be doing (from programmers point of view - not from users!) some things in Windows (e.g. changing NAS IP addres by web browser, updating new kernel/OS services just by uploading 1 file etc...)
And that I don't speak about licencing (AFAIK it's forbidden to run email/WWW/SQL server on such a server - small companies don't want to have X servers for X services).
Score +4? (Score:5, Insightful)
How'd this get +4?
- A.P.
Re:Score +4? (Score:1)
I'm confused (Score:4, Funny)
But I was told that Unix is like a dark, moldy basement and I need to find a way out through Windows.
Slashdot v2.0 [monolinux.com]
Stay away from Iomega (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Stay away from Iomega (Score:2)
Re:Stay away from Iomega (Score:1)
Price for the MS-Version (Score:1)
I know the price: too much!
If you're right, noone replies
Re:Price for the MS-Version (Score:2, Troll)
Actually, I hear the price is approximately equal to eleventy billion dollars.
Note: Please don't mod down if you don't catch the SNL reference
Forget the Price... (Score:1)
Re:Price for the MS-Version (Score:1)
./ paid advertisement? (Score:1, Offtopic)
So does "UNIX based" mean Unix or Linux? (Score:1)
It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, times have been tough for Iomega. They haven't posted a profit for several years. On a related note, they haven't come up with a decent new product for several years. Instead of innovating, they tried to get into the business of producing cheap, commodity devices (like tape drives and CD writers) that nobody was interested in buying. Coupled with the Click of Death [grc.com] problems, this new strategy backfired and sent Iomega into the red - where they have remained ever since.
And that brings me to my story: I talked to my buddy on the phone a few weeks ago, and he said that morale is low at Iomega. The company has been slashing jobs and pay every quarter, and he has had to lay off many of his subordinates. He said that the NAS idea is a last-ditch effort to squeeze profits out of a dying industry, and that Iomega's business plan is to sell the NAS devices at a loss (to stay competitive with the big guys) and to sell overpriced support contracts to try to stay in business. For his sake I hope it works out, but for all intents and purposes Iomega is dead. But nobody said that mormons have any business sense anyway, so I don't blame them.
flyingbuttmonkeys at 11 O'clock!! (Score:1)
You might want to tell your buddy to remind them to get people to sign a contract if they're going that route!
Server Apliances are good things. (Score:2)
Re:Server Apliances are good things. (Score:2)
1) higher cost
2) lower performance
3) poor functionality
4) vendor lock
5) lost productivity trying to get the damn things functioning properly
Replacing PC servers with devices like these and Cobalt boxes is a joke both in cost and performance.... If you have a problem that results in your continously tinkering with servers maybe you should address it instead of buying your way out of a fixation
In the long run I can see that NAS devices will be beneficial but right now the cheap ones simply aren't mature enough to trust...
Huh? (Score:1, Informative)
I always thought the point of NAS was that it used standards like TCP/IP and a web interface specifically so it wasn't linked to one specific OS. I'd expect any NAS device to be useable with any platform that supports a browser and IP networking, so just how was the older NAS device Windows-only? Was it using NetBIOS or something?
No GigaE? What a waste :) (Score:2)
Yet 100bT networking with a throughput of what, 10-12mbps? GigaE options would let them have 100-120mbps, at least...
Re:No GigaE? What a waste :) (Score:4, Funny)
That's probably why they included it.
http://www.iomega.com/nas/p410_sys.html [iomega.com]
Re:No GigaE? What a waste :) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No GigaE? What a waste :) (Score:1)
Maybe if you went in the source code and tweaked all your software, it would come closer, but we are talking maybe a 2-4X speed increase over 100Mbit, even using Jumbo Frames.
Re:No GigaE? What a waste :) (Score:2)
http://www.iomega.com/nas/nas_tech2.html
It mentioned 10bT/100bT, and nowhere 1000bT. It didn't occur to me to scan through every variation to see that the highest end model *did* have 1000bT when the lower end ones did not.
And doesn't GigE give you more connections at the same bandwidth, rather than significantly higher bandwidth with only one connection?
Re:No GigaE? What a waste :) (Score:1)
No, it's one connection, it's just a whole lot less efficient, because programs were not designed to use GigE. You have to use Jumbo Frames (9000MTU) to even get any signifant improvement, and even then, unless you are willing to edit the source code of every app you run and change the way it handles socket buffers, to get a little more out of it.
Appletalk is supported so I assume... (Score:1)
Affordable for home users?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway...my point, and I do have one, is this: The company that can make an affordable ($200) NAS and make it SIMPLE for ANYONE to use, will succeed. THe cheapest out there (last time I checked) is @$400, and is a paltry 40GB. Sell 100 GB of storage for $200 or less, and people will buy it. I rolled my own NAS for not much more than the cost of a new HDD, but I have mad skillz that the average consumer doesn't (ability to scrounge and build a PC for close to nothing)
Re:Affordable for home users?? (Score:2)
Re:Affordable for home users?? (Score:2)
Re:Affordable for home users?? (Score:1)
Just network 'em (Score:2)
especially with laptops! :) (Score:1)
In the tradeoffs that come with laptops, large hard drives are usually one of the sacrificed items. (Yeah, largish ones are available, especially largish in absolute terms, but in relative terms, 'real' hard drives are going to be larger, faster and cheaper for a while yet
I tried importing video last night (first time for everything) onto my iBook, and watched alarmingly as the "available space" dropped inexorably
timothy
Snap Server (Score:2)
But I bet it's hackable, like TiVo. Why not buy a cheap one and upgrade the drive?
Affordable BACKUP for home users? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not many people can afford a DLT library to backup their 200GB of data.
The way it's looking, a hotswappable drive might be the cheapest backup solution in the long run...yikes!
Re:Affordable BACKUP for home users? (Score:2)
Of course, I want to be able to back up from more than one OS...
If I felt it safe enough, I might even store HD Images of different versions, though I doubt they'd be bootable. Still, back up the entire OS before trying a new version...
200 GB is less than 10 snapshots unless one uses compression, which slows down the backup significantly.
OTOH, it doesn't really need to be hot-swappable for a home system. But that sure would be nice!
Re:Affordable BACKUP for home users? (Score:2)
Give my wife a digital camera and she could probably take enough pictures in about 2 months
d20 Conversion (Score:2)
Drawers for Disks, DVD, and Firewire/USB2 for home (Score:2)
You can get removable plastic drawers for disk drives for about $25, in which you mount whatever flavor of disk you like. When you want to change disks, just pop the drawer out and pop in a new one. They're typically 5.25" outside and hold 3.5" drives, and of course $25 has gone from "trivial percentage of the disk price" to "non-trivial percentage but still $25" :-) The latest price I saw for disk drives at Fry's was CD-Rs are the new floppy-disks - they cost less than $0.25 on sale, drives come included with your PC, and they're big enough for a single application but not really enough to back up your whole machine frequently. (If the drive's not included, they're cheap and fast.) DVD recording standards are still changing, and I'm not buying one for a while, but if you've got a standard that works for your PC and your TV's DVD, go for it - 4MB or so drives are big enough to be reasonably practical for backing up most systems.
External drives - they're *really* convenient for home. Firewire costs more than IDE drives, but not *too* much more, and you can get firewire boards for your PC for not too much money and impress your Mac-addict friends with your broadmindedness. USB1.x is slow (fine for MP3 jukeboxes, semi-ok for cameras, still really boring for actual disks), but USB2 rocks out and you should be able to buy USB2 shoebox disks at reasonable prices pretty soon. I've seen some Firewire-shoebox-add-your-own-IDE-drive boxes in the store, so you can buy one to start with and upgrade it as the disk-drive market continues to get bigger and cheaper.
$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much. (Score:2)
With 160GB IDE drives running for about $225 and IDE RAID cards similarly cheap, this seems like a natural nitche for linux to be in. Sure, it's not enterprise-ready and won't be as scalable as a SCSI-based system, but it would be perfect for a massive PVR or small-business file server.
Anyone know of such a project?
Re:$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much. (Score:1)
Re:$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much. (Score:2)
Re:$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much. (Score:2)
cd
make && make install
--saint
Re:$4000 for 480GB seems a bit much. (Score:2)
There are several caveats:
1. Cooling: keep those HDs cool (not easy in a standard case, but it can be done, you may need to rig some sort of active cooling on the HDs, especially if they are in half height 3 1/2 bays).
2. Power: Jury rigging a second power supply might be a good idea. In any case buy good high power power supplies.
3. Connectivity: I didn't need super high speeds, so I just used a decent 10/100 Ethernet card.
4. Case: Cases large enough to hold that many drives are not common, but they aren't too hard to find.
It's really not as hard of a project as it originally appears. And $4000 for a 480GB device is really pretty cheap in the business market from what I understand.
How long? (Score:2)
COD (Score:5, Funny)
Re:COD (Score:1)
No, but just wait til the admin comes back from lunch...
around the data center pond (Score:1)
The poor admin will be afraid to open the door.
They're alive, I tell you.
Re:COD (Score:1)
I would also be careful eating lunch.
Is Iomega's web server running on a Iomega NAS? (Score:1)
Whats the compatibility with MS SQL (Score:2)
Anyway, what is the compatibility of this thing with MS SQL server. last I checked, there was only like one or two NAS devices that could support SQL databases on them.
I'ld love to have a cheaper solution of having SQL database files on a network device, without sacrificing reliablity...
Does anybody do anything with SQL Server and a NAS device currently?
Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL (Score:1)
Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL (Score:1)
Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL (Score:2)
Just to clarify: Do you want to have the database FILES sit on the NAS box or install SQL Server on the NAS box? One might be possible, but unwise. The other would be both impossible and unwise.
[OT] Re:Whats the compatibility with MS SQL (Score:1)
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/article
http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Articl
http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=128
There's almost no way you can get the performance you need with a NAS. Avoid NAS for the near future, and go with SAN. And don't listen to NetApp... they claim they can support database access, but they can't.
Roll Your Own NAS Recipe (Score:2, Interesting)
Pick up two 160 GB drives for about $200 each, an Athlon 1.4 GHz mainboard combo for about $140, a full-tower case with redundant power supplies for about $200 (or a *U rack unit), an Intel 10/100 ethernet card for $20, and the rest of the pieces/parts can be had for less than $100 with frugal shopping. Total cost for twice the storage of Iomega's lowest-end offering (which is $2000): about $860. With the remaining money you're saving, pick up a solid tape drive and practice religious backups (or step up to SCSI). I'm sorry, but I'm tired of paying a premium for "brand name" crap. I have the feeling a lot of other folks on this list are, too. Heck, for the Windows guys, spend the remaining money on a full version of your favorite Redmond OS. Rinse, lather, repeat -- and be satisfied with the fruits of your labors.
Re:Roll Your Own NAS Recipe (Score:2, Informative)
Ethernet is onboard
JOhn
My thoughts on this are like my thoughts on... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is the key criterion: doesn't crash.
I'd rather be locked in than locked out.
Hmmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
We use the Compaq TaskSmart 2400N NAS. Yes, it runs Win2K but it's rock solid and very good. It's built around a normal Compaq server so we already have spares. It can do up to 10TB in Cluster config. It uses all standard Compaq drives and parts which can be shared among other systems. Plus, you can manage it from Insight Manager. It also exports out to NFS for UNIX clients.
It seems anyone that needed 1/2 TB on a NAS would already have other servers and would be better served going with their vendor's answer, assuming they had a good one.
Iomewhat? (Score:4, Insightful)
Those same guys that brought the BUZ video editing card that ended up with no good drivers and being just another expensive scsi card since the video part wasn't working half decently? (yeah I got one)
Those same people that had loads of trouble with their portable cdr drives?
Those same people selling the infamous Click! and never took off and left you with an expensive useless piece of
Hell, at the price they sell their stuff, I'd still go with my solution: IDE based, for performance, 3ware board with loads of drives. You get linux/windows support. Medium storage, good performance, Adaptec board with 4 drives, and POS version, well if you thought about getting NAS (which is a tad too expensive in my opinion) you don't need to consider a POS solution
Anyways, with their track record, I'd go with a Maxtor NAS or any other company before Iomega, and even if there would be only Iomega in that market, I'd make my own solution with off the shelf parts before trusting my data to them, Did that mistake too many times already.
Re:Iomewhat? (Score:5, Funny)
Fool me 5 times, shame on me?
Re:Iomewhat? (Score:2)
I hope you didn't try to hang a SCSI Zip drive off the card... those things had to be the ONLY device on the SCSI chain, or else they'd lose data (even more rapidly than Zip drives normally do).
The advent of cheap and plentiful CD-R technology couldn't have come soon enough. The most catastrophic data losses I've ever experienced are all thanks to Iomega's lousy products.
Re:Iomewhat? (Score:2)
Of all the lower cost solutions, I've found this to consistently be the best bet. A bit more work initially, but less work, and more control in the long run. When we contacted Maxtor for assistance in recovering data off of one of their pooched units, they informed us that the data isn't their responsibility, and offered no help. (Yes, we did have backups, and got relatively recent data off of that; but a tiny bit of help in recovery would have been better than just being told that the integrity of the data wasn't their problem.)
-me
Re:Iomewhat? (Score:2)
Cards with that quality are usually about $400...and while it does suck that they didn't write drivers, there are now drivers IN THE KERNEL which work great. You don't even have to patch.
So what's your complaint about it? You've been using Windows as your main OS, haven't you?
Reliability? (Score:1)
NAS Devices in general (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:NAS Devices in general (Score:3, Informative)
We needed a large NAS for storing disk images for our training room. Basically an image of each MS OS with each browser available for that OS.
Myself and one of the other admins, built an IDE raid solution using the 3ware ide card and a bunch of hard drives. We now have a hotswap 160GB hardware raid storage device running nothing but linux and samba.
Oh yeah, it has an Intel DualPort server nic using the Intel drivers to bond the interfaces. Plug that into the cisco switch and I have a nice 160GB NAS for around 2k.
I've also set the RAID's fs to reiserfs because I didn't want this fucker to have to fsck if for some odd reason it went down. (It's only happened once). I'm thinking that wasn't the best choice since all the files we're working with are at a minimum 1GB.
Get The Windows Version (Score:4, Funny)
Iomega ...NAS..Unix (Score:2)
After all, not everyone in the universe has been sucked in and assimilated over to Windows.
The funny thing though is the fact that most of the people using these appliances are looking for quick plug it in and forget solutions or they would load a cheap PC with a bunch of big drives and roll their own.
It would be nice to see a review comparing the Unix to Windows install of these machines. Which tends to work better -- I would think obviously that the Unix version would be more stable and the configuration UIs would be standardized so that the choice would make Unix the logical choice for most.
_______________________________________________
Nothing unsual (Score:1, Informative)
What's the big deal anyway? There are plenty of inexpensive *nix NAS devices; for example:
http://www.snapserver.com/
Broken DHTML, sweet product tho' (Score:2)
Slightly off-topic - the DHTML is b0rked in mozilla; a quick search at :) http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/slashdot/index.html?id =134931 is the one, anyway... ) Yes folks, you can file mozilla bugs against the "tech evangelism" component to sic the mozilla wranglers onto the site's designers and get them to fix non-standard HTML for the non-IE world's benefit. (Remember when sites were designed only for Netscape, and we used to complain that they should test on mionirty products such as IE? Ah, happy days...) </ot>
bugzilla.mozilla.org [mozilla.org] shows no-one else has logged this so I've done so myself [mozilla.org]. (Hmmm, actually I was just searching against the URL to find the bug I just logged and it didn't turn up... oddness... ) (And now I get the error "Sorry, bugzilla links from Slashdot are not allowed." heh!
iSCSI? (Score:1)
I don't understand this. (Score:1)
Wheel reinvention (Score:1)
The easiest way to accomplish this is to use an OS and associated software that can do this already (ie: Windows server or UNIX w/Samba).
Network Appliance took an OS and stripped it down to the bare minimum required to do what the NAS needs to, but they spent considerable time and money doing so. Most people are willing to take the extra/unused functionality of a full OS rather than design their own, new, NAS OS.
[my opinions are my own. They definately aren't my company's.]
Re:Wheel reinvention (Score:1)
Not neccessarily a way to make $$$ fast (Score:1)
Implementation is much easier and cheaper in both the short and long run with an off-the-shelf OS solution.
What you might gain is performance and stability, but will you gain enough to offset the fact that you now have to charge $20k for what could have been a $10k wheel in order to cover your SW development costs?
To the price-performance leader go the customers... sometimes.
[my opinions. Not anyone else's.]
NAS reviews? (Score:1)
W
Sigh...enough about COD. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sigh...enough about COD. (Score:2)
Europe and NIS support (Score:2)
Re:Europe and NIS support (Score:2)
anyway as I was saying...
would be nice to have NIS or LDAP for authentication besides Windows Domain...