The Yellow Machine in Review

We recently had in the office one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions. The Yellow Machine, in a nutshell, is a pretty looking machine roughly the size of a decent UPS box that's got either 1 TB or 1.6 TB of storage space, with the all RAID fun and such. We ran with it here for about a month or so. My impressions are below.

So, the machine itself is, well, uh, cute. Bright yellow, good clear display lights so that you can see traffic on the different drives. The drives themselves are IDE drives, so yeah, you don't get the speed of SCSI, but frankly, if you are looking for 1.6 TB of SCSI, you probably need to look at jbods or the like. But since the unit is really designed to be an office storage environment, that's probably just fine.

Feature-wise, the unit has almost everything that you want. What is interesting to me, that I haven't seen in many NAS units is that it's got a double firewall. The interface for handling network isn't quite as nice, as say, a wireless unit, but it's decent. You can have the machine sit as your connection to your WAN (it handles DHCP, static IP) do port-forwarding and all those other fun things. The primary problem that I had was actually the config of first getting it setup, but that didn't take much time once I actually read the manual. *grin* It will also do web-access controls for users, monitor e-mails sent, a whole slew of other stuff.

The network support is robust. It does SMB/NFS, and supports Windows and Mac as desktop clients, and does indeed work under Linux as well based on my testing. All of the interface work is done via HTTP so as long as you've got a somewhat recent flavor of web browser, you'll be dandy although it's optimized for IE6. The unit is surprisingly quiet - many times, while I was at my desk (it sat under there) I forgot it was there and kicked it over. It still works fine after that, BTW.

In terms of speed and performance, nothing hugely different then normal network file transfers, but that's more a function of network traffic/speed then anything else. The device handled multiple people using (it has permissions built-in) easily, and did uploads & downloads of big VOB files, MP3 directories, normal files - it shrugged it off. The major issue is pricing; the 1 TB is about $1300. Now, for the DIY crowd, yes, using Linux you could very easily put together a RAID 5, 1 TB machine for not that much more -- and you are probably going to do it anyway. But for the target market, especially situations in which the IT resources are limited, it's a great machine for the ease of setting it up. And since it supports doing automated back-ups as well as has the serial port to work with a UPS system, you don't have to worry about the whole crapping out and losing all of your data. All in all, a great unit. Price is a concern, but a minor one.

Kano Technologies

[futuresheep]

Kano Technologies sells similar products as well. We're using the 1.6 TB Xspand storage unit and are very happy with it. We use it for our daily backups, and then use tape for our weekly offsite backups. We saved a bundle of money in lisencing for our backup software by doing things this way. For a small company, it works very well.

Kano Technologies [kanotechnologies.com]

Infrant

[toasterll]

I got the Infrant Redy NAS, it's a pretty nice machine. they have a new verison X6 that lets you incramentally upgrade your drives and automatically resizes your volume. It's also nice to buy the machine with no drives and upgrade that when you can afford it.

If it's an unmodified kernel...

[brunes69]

... and I see no reason why it wouldn't be (all the chips in this thing are likely pretty standard stuff), they could just point you at kernel.org

If you don't modify the original you don't have to distribute the source youself, you only have to distribute the source to any changes or derrivatives. See the GPL for details. Specifically:

c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
to distribute corresponding source code.

This means all they need to do is provide a link to kernel.org

Another box to check out

[ob1ivion13]

I saw one of these at a place I worked at:Buffalo systems [buffalotech.com] ... little less flashy on the presentation but nonetheless does its job... also with a 1Tb at $1000, i think it's a better deal

I also reviewed this machine

[Jim Buzbee]

I also reviewed this machine in an article on TomsNetworking. My review included fun things like pulling the power from one of the RAID drives while streaming a movie, comparative performance graphs, etc.

Here's [tomsnetworking.com] my review.

Tom's Networking:

[ltwally]

There is perhaps a better review at Tom's Networking [tomsnetworking.com].

Here is a quote of their conclusion:

The Yellow Machine's RAID features can bring a greater degree of confidence in the safety of your data than you might find in an inexpensive consumer NAS device. In addition, the flexibility of its built-in switch and router bring extra capabilities to the table in a compact form-factor.

But the Yellow Machine misses the mark on a number of points, especially its primary value-proposition of being an all-in-one box for small-office users. If all you want is a basic NAT firewall, the Yellow Machine will probably suit you. But its use of a proxy that is limited only to email and web protection (and buggy at that) will give you fits if you want to limit what users can do on the Internet. Frankly, you'd be a lot better served buying a $40 router and just setting the Yellow Machine to Storage mode.

But even as a NAS, the Yellow Machine fails to match up to RAID competion like Buffalo's TeraStation and Infrant's ReadyNAS due to its missing print server, inability to connect to USB-based storage devices and missing support of user file access via FTP and HTTP.

The bottom line is that the Yellow Machine's relatively high cost, merely modest performance, and problematic proxy behaviors should cause prospective purchasers to think twice before buying.

For my money, looks like I'll be investigating other products, first.

Re:Kano Technologies

[tlhIngan]

I've bought a low-end Buffalo TeraStation box for home use that does a similar thing as well. Comes in 640GB, 1TB and 1.6TB sizes for (I think) $700, $1000, and don't know about the last one. Low end, cheap, runs Linux inside, so you have concat, raid1 and raid5 configuration of disks. Only thing is that the standard configuration doesn't have NFS (why, oh why?), just SMB and AppleShare. The GigE on it is useless, though. And there are plenty of hacks since the main "OS" part is really a tarball containing the binaries and scripts, so a "firmware" upgrade can be done quite readily. And there are 4 USB2.0 ports for either 1 printer or additional shared hard drive storage - not sure if they can also be RAIDed, but should be possible).

The most unfortunate thing is that Buffalo Technologies is *violating* the GPL (I can't see why they don't enclose the source in the special "utility" share they have that contains software, manuals, etc), since it is a rather nice box for home and small office.

Nice hackable PowerPC Linux box, really. Unsuitable for enterprise use, but for home storage or small business, it's not too bad, and it's cheap. Easily upgradable, too.

Re:RAID

[InvalidError]

Right now, RAID6 is starting to gain popularity in high-availability environments.

With basic RAID5, the array can handle a single drive failure and can only detect odd errors with no possibility of correcting them. With RAID5+1, a hot-spare is available to start unattended rebuild when a failure occurs but costs and extra drive while still leaving the array vulnerable to a second failure during the rebuild process. With RAID6, error-correcting codes are generated for the N extra (non-data) drives to provide N/2 bits error correction, multi-bits error detection and recovery of up to N erasures/failures.

RAID6 is more computationnally expensive than RAID5 but it can be made arbitrarily resilient to subtle soft errors typical RAID5 would never detect. An external box 6xSATA/NCQ RAID6 with SATA-3G-uplink storage controller would be a nice companion for anybody who takes data integrity seriously but does not want to do TB-scale backups. (Of course, this still leaves data vulnerable to infection-induced or otherwise accidental trashing.)