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Hardware

Iomega's New Unix (Optional) NAS Appliance 201

Posted by timothy from the optional-factory-installed-options-optional dept.
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."
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Iomega's New Unix (Optional) NAS Appliance More

Iomega's New Unix (Optional) NAS Appliance

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  • Iomega.. (Score:4, Flamebait)

    by PopeAlien ( 164869 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @03:35PM (#3272100) Homepage Journal
    Mmm. Boy I hope these aren't susceptible to the click of death [google.ca]. Ah yes, the reliability of the zip disk..

    • Re:Iomega.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DocSnyder ( 10755 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @03:46PM (#3272171)
      The "click of death" was very bad for Iomega. About six years ago I had a Jaz drive with six disks. As soon as the first became unusable, the Jaz took all the other ones with it, which became probably my worst data loss. If anyone of my coworkers asked me if I would recommend a Iomega NAS device, that is, any Iomega device, what would you really expect me to say, regardless of whether it might be the greatest device ever?
      • Which is exactly why I find it strange that this comment was moderated a 'troll' or 'offtopic'.. This is a factual statement about a MAJOR problem some Iomega products had. In reality I hope and expect that experience has made Iomega a lot more attentive to reliablity problems. I guess we'll find out.
        • Which is exactly why I find it strange that this comment was moderated a 'troll' or 'offtopic'.. This is a factual statement about a MAJOR problem some Iomega products had. In reality I hope and expect that experience has made Iomega a lot more attentive to reliablity problems. I guess we'll find out.

          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.

          • I'm afraid I must disagree.

            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?
      • And whatever happened to SparQ? I bought an excellent 1Gb drive with some free carts thrown in, about a month before the entire firm went bust. (approx) three years later, it's still my primary backup device - yet it cost about the same price as 10 or 100Mb Jaz drives... and we're still using them (Jaz) at work(!) I guess it's just another VHS/Beta situation...
        • And whatever happened to SparQ?
          You mean Syquest, the maker of the SparQ and other removable storage. Iomega bought their intellectual property shortly after they went bankrupt. Mostly so nobody could use the technology to start a potential competitor IMHO. I hope they at least incorporate some of Syquest's technology into their products, as it was better than Iomega's at the time. I eventually caved in and bought a Zip drive, since most of my friends and the computers at work and school all had Zip drives.
    • The first three links returned are either dead or non applicable - here's a good one
      CLICK OF DEATH [aol.com]

    • IMHO, the Click of Death was overrated. At least in my school it seemed the only people who got it were the people who abused their drives (dropping them, cramming those zip disks in there with 20 foot-pounds of force, etc...). The real reason the Zip drive is a footnote in history is the cost of the media. $10 for 100MB (which I believe is still the going rate) is way way too expensive to replace $0.30 floppy disks, even if they do hold more per dollar. I got a Zip drive thinking the media would come down to $1 or $2 a pop and people would use them like floppy disks. Most people don't mind if they loose a floppy or two trading files because they are so cheap, but a $10 zip disk is another matter entirely. Now my Zip drive gathers dust in the corner, fully obsolete by ethernet, broadband, and CD-Burner technologies. It is rather sobering to think that you can buy 25 (or in some cases 50!) CDs for the cost of a single zip disk.

  • Good. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by llamalicious ( 448215 )
    I'm sick of being tied into a MS-centric NAS box.
    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. :)
    • now only if they added netapp like snapshots I am there. I have searched and searched, I have to say nothing compares to a netapp. just my .02c
      • AFAIK, 'snapshot' is just a filesystem mirror. Nothing a little perl script can't fix.

        • Re:Good. (Score:4, Informative)

          by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @03:59PM (#3272273) Homepage
          Nope; NetApp implements snapshots using copy-on-write, so they consume less disk space, take effectively no time to create, and are atomic with respect to filesystem operations (so there won't be any problems if you're accessing the filesystem while the snapshot is in progress). Check out their File System Design for an NFS File Server Appliance [netapp.com] white paper for the technical details if you're interested.
          • Raidzone (www.raidzone.com) also makes Linux-based NAS products. They're (for the obvious reasons) many times less expensive than NetApp, and easier to customize the configuration (just add new rpms) but aren't nearly as slick in a few regards.

            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]
      • Compaq's NAS boxes do NETAPP-like snapshots. Very good boxes, but they do run Windows 2K.
      • Other choices are EMC IP4700 and Celerra products for midrange to enterprise level NAS storage.
    • My company is producing NAS server based on Linux (RH 7.2) supporting all kinds of Windows, Apples an UN*X. I can't imagine doing such a stuff with with Windows. E.g. Maxtor's NAS has 1 GB (yes, GIGABYTE!) RAM - our system runs @128 MB with 90 MB used for caching... Should I tell more? (maybe that our EU price for 1.6 TB RAID5 is 6 k$ ;))))
      • I forget to say the main thing - Maxtor is using Windows 2000 as their NAS OS.
      • Why can't you imagine it? Our Compaq NAS box running Windows does all that. Yes, it has 1GB of RAM but that's just for file caching. Contrary to Slashdot belief Windows itself doesn't need even close to that.

        RAM is cheap, who cares.

        • Re:Good. (Score:2, Informative)

          by Libor Vanek ( 248963 )
          Because I'm project manager/main programmer. Imagine - whole NAS was done just by 2 men/1.5 year and it has more features then any NAS on the market for 50-300%(!) less price...

          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)

      by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @05:24PM (#3272883) Homepage Journal
      Yes [ibm.com] indeed [sun.com], there are absolutely [netapp.com] no NAS solutions [emc.com] out there that don't lock you [promarktech.com] into a Microsoft-centric solution [auspex.com].

      How'd this get +4?

      - A.P.
      • Though EMC will lock you into much worse, I think the current mandatory service contract from EMC requires a young virgin, the first born male of the family of an executive in the purchasing company, and I think that I remember hearing something about a satanic worship...

  • I'm confused (Score:4, Funny)

    by Hemos (editor) ( 569506 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @03:38PM (#3272119) Homepage
    Iomega's New Unix (Optional) NAS Appliance

    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)

    by Neil Watson ( 60859 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @03:41PM (#3272141) Homepage
    The click of death has already been mentioned but a few years ago I bought 10 Iomega IDE tape drives for some workstations (the network was P2P and I was inexperienced). I had a %50 failure rate on the drives. They would snap the tapes as soon as you loaded them. I would RMA the drives get new ones and some of those would do the same thing.
    • I had several friends warn me about Iomega, who had similar failure rates with their tape drives. Thinking the times had changed and that Iomega had surely learned from their past, I bought a Jaz 1GB drive. It died approximately every three months, usually taking a full 1GB of data with it. At work my production department bought 5 drives, and cartridges were almost always bad by their thrid use. A 2GB drive, which was supposed to be more reliable, only proved to eat more files than the 1GB version. To top off all of these problems, Iomega's customer support was quite unfriendly, always made you fax originaly receipts in as proof of date of purchase (for replacement drives that died too) and several times tried to deny warranty claims on their lifetime warranty for media. Best of all, the drives and media were always kept well within the environmental specs. Hopefully their NAS box uses another manufacturer's fully sealed, dustproof hard drive and interface boards. And don't put anything important on these boxes!
  • they do not yet have pricing up for the Windows version

    I know the price: too much!

    If you're right, noone replies ...
  • I guess the Article [slashdot.org] about SlashDot's new paid advertisement plan isn't a joke then.

  • I'm sure that would affect pricing if it was Unix or Linux based...

  • It's too bad Iomega is dying anyway (Score:4, Informative)

    by b.foster ( 543648 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @03:48PM (#3272188)
    One of my college buddies took a job at Iomega after graduation because it was an up-and-coming company - back in its heydey, most new PCs came with a shiny Zip100 drive next to the floppy, and times were good. Iomega used to be one of the tech world's few great innovators - and the Jaz concept was pure genius, especially compared with the primitive Bernoulli boxes that Jaz superceded.

    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.

    /B.

  • While I find it really sad that this day and age that they need a Unix (Wich probably covers most Modern OS's Today (From Linux, Solaris, ... , OS X) ) and a Windows version (a group of OS's Made by one company). But Server Apliances are a good thing for companies. It allows a clean way to get your server information done without having more PCs and Servers around. Use a Cobol Server for Web Services, Use this Iomega device for sharing your network. And with a lot less work then with actuall servers at near the same cost (Unless you buy the cheapo PC stuff that you have to replace every month). Plus most of the time these Server Aplinces uses the correct tool (OS, Supporting Software, etc) for the right job. Alowing it to be more dependable and by not letting us mess with it and make it do more then it was designed, assures that it runs more securly then most servers. And gets people away from those Windows server farms and allows more open standards.
    • Why? Because it's cool? Server information done? I'm sorry but all of this is just to hook in the business people who can get these things budgeted quicker than the techies. The "benefit" that such devices provide is:
      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 :). I'll take a standard PC anyday while you fondle your beautiful Cobalt.

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Am I missing something here?

    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?

  • Hmm, Raid 5 in hardware, with speeds approaching, what, 40mbps? 60mbps? 80mbps?

    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)

      by klieber ( 124032 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @03:54PM (#3272232) Homepage
      You're right -- GigE would be a natural option for this device.

      That's probably why they included it.

      http://www.iomega.com/nas/p410_sys.html [iomega.com]
      • There needs to be a +1 *Zing* mod for posts like that.
      • Good one, in seriousness though, the original poster was wrong in another respect, adding GigE, even with 9000 MTU, gives you nothing near 10X speed increase.

        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.
        • Sorry, I clicked on tech specs:
          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?
          • And doesn't GigE give you more connections at the same bandwidth, rather than significantly higher bandwidth with only one connection?

            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 that OSX is also supported via NFS? Anyone. I was not quite sure.

  • Affordable for home users?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by billmaly ( 212308 ) <bill.maly@NosPaM.mcleodusa.net> on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @03:51PM (#3272205)
    Let's face it, home users are going to start needing additional space outside of their desktop PC's in a few years. Music, video, and information will eventually overflow their older PC's, and many people won't want to buy a new PC, yet they'll want 24 hour access to their data.

    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) :-).
    • Disk capacity is doubling every year, so I predict that home users will just migrate to newer disks or add external Firewire disks. NAS is overkill.
      • NAS is overkill, until 2 or more PC's want to access the data that is stored. Copying identical data to all PC's in the home isn't all that practical, IMHO. Offloading that storage to the NAS in the basement and sharing it among all is a more elegant solution. Plus, it makes backing up files SOOO much simpler!
    • I am slowly converting my disproportionate-to-my-skills collection of computers to laptops instead of ridiculous boxes (ridiculous to move, lift, find room for, etc) and awkward monitors.

      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 ... glad I only had 5 minutes of Easter dinner to play with. I was jonesing for a 300GB RAID array transparently available to me, but Nope. Let's see Iomega come out with *that*.

      timothy
    • Snap Server [snapserver.com] has a cheapish ($550) 40GB network server. These things get MUCH more expensive as you go up in size, though - I suspect that once the consultants convinced them that they had an "Enterprise Class Network Attached Storage Appliance" instead of a miniserver they decided they could jack up the price.

      But I bet it's hackable, like TiVo. Why not buy a cheap one and upgrade the drive?

    • This is what is needed. Disk space is getting huge right now. Floppys don't work for backups anymore :)

      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!
    • Lever 3 Hacker gains "Mad Hardware Skillz" and can scrounge and build a PC for close to nothing as a standard action.

    • Appliances for home? Don't be silly! An appliance is a high-performance combination of PC, serverware, and drives that lets you feed a network, and is usually far overpriced compared to putting the disks directly in your PC - if you were going to spend that kind of money, buy a new PC and turn the old one in to an appliance - otherwise, either buy external disk drives instead, or buy removable-disk drawers and put the disks in your machine, or pick a removable-media standard like DVD and use that.

      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.

  • It seems as though there should be an open-source software package that would allow you to take an old computer case, throw some disks, a NIC or three and a RAID card in there and have your own, poor-man's NAS device. All you'd need would be some sort of slimmed-down linux distro optimized to serve files and with some sort of web front end for configuring NIS/Samba shares.

    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?
    • Well, we did this [smythco.com].
    • Just make sure that you're not using ext2 and you either turn off cached writes or hook your NAS into an UPS.
    • It seems as though there should be an open-source software package that would allow you to take an old computer case, throw some disks, a NIC or three and a RAID card in there and have your own, poor-man's NAS device.

      cd /usr/ports/net/samba
      make && make install

      --saint
    • Heck, if you want to be really cheap you don't even need those IDE RAID cards. I built a home brew 650GB NAC for a little under $1500 several months ago (10 80GB drives, RAID5 through vinum on FreeBSD). Beware that Promise (who seemed like a natural choice) only supports 1 of any card in any system. In reality you can put 2 ATA100 adapters in a system (and a third "misc" adapter, like the on-board ATA controller or something). I have them broken into two LUNs so I can use the slave positions for the second LUN without impacting the performace of the system.
      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.
  • I'm sure this will work great, until it starts making a strange clicking noise...

  • COD (Score:5, Funny)

    by TimButterfield ( 16686 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @03:54PM (#3272239) Homepage
    If the click of death happens in a data center and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
    • If the click of death happens in a data center and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

      No, but just wait til the admin comes back from lunch...

      ...I can hear the screams now!
      • I can just imagine it. As evening approaches, first just one starts to click. A bit later, another responds and clicks back. Then another joins in. Pretty soon, you have a whole chorus going.

        The poor admin will be afraid to open the door.

        They're alive, I tell you.

      • Re:COD (Score:1)

        by craw ( 6958 )
        In a data center no one can hear you scream.

        I would also be careful eating lunch.
  • I had the same effect with my rest-in-peace Jaz drive when it broke - the machine became slow and unreactive. Connection timed out... Or is the site simply /.ed? ;-)
  • MS haters just skip past this post....

    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?
    • It's an IDE based system, would you want to run a DB on an IDE system, even if it's dedicated to just file serving?
    • As I recall, SQL Server simply pukes if you try to put the database on a network volume until version 7.0... Not sure about 2000, didn't get around to using it prior to my layoff.

      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.
    • SQL Server does not support NAS because it's got some serious latency and performance problems in comparison to SAN.

      http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles /q 304/2/61.asp

      http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Article ID =23166

      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.
  • First, head to pricewatch.com [pricewatch.com].

    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.

  • My thoughts on this are like my thoughts on... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 3-State Bit ( 225583 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @03:58PM (#3272262)
    ...all embedded and/or otherwise non-interacting technology: you plug it in, you get the storage. Who cares what OS is on? As long as it doesn't crash.

    Which is the key criterion: doesn't crash.
    I'd rather be locked in than locked out.

  • Hmmm... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NetJunkie ( 56134 ) <jason.nash@CHICAGOgmail.com minus city> on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @04:01PM (#3272279)
    They are light on the details. What speed drives? What kind of internal controller? Anything in this box redundant or is all my storage gone when a power supply fails? Things like that are important, and they don't seem to mention it when I looked. I also question buying something like this from someone that makes nothing else even close.

    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)

    by tcc ( 140386 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @04:01PM (#3272288) Homepage Journal
    Those guys that have a buttload of dysfuntionnal 1GB JAZ drives?

    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)

      by rtaylor ( 70602 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @04:10PM (#3272347) Homepage
      Fool me once, shame on you.

      Fool me 5 times, shame on me?
    • 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)

      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.
    • 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,
      Maxtor NAS units are unreliable pieces of junk. We had three of them, and three of them are now non-functional. Of course, now that they changed from BSD to W2K, I'm sure they're *much* more reliable (shudder).

      I'd make my own solution with off the shelf parts before trusting my data to them
      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
    • Buz! is amazing...have you looked at the specs?
      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?

  • Maybe I'm drinking the NetApp coolaid, but what is the reliability of IDE drives in these situations? I have a Cobalt NasRaq, which was quite nice, but limited to 60 gigs. And while it has never failed, I would never use it as a primary file server. Anybody have any experience using stuff like this as opposed to the very expensive redundant nas products?

  • NAS Devices in general (Score:2, Interesting)

    by smcavoy ( 114157 )
    I was looking at getting a NAS device for a new project. I ruled out IDE based, mainly for performance reasons. I looked at Dell's (Windows based) which are exactly the same as their servers except they cost (literally) thousands more, for less of a configuration. I was not about to go out and pay 3k for "managment" software (especially when every system that was going to access was Linux based, it seemed kind of odd). I ended up just getting a decked out system for less money, installed Linux on it and am some what happy. I would like to manage it like an appliance, complete with a web and/or java interface. I couldn't find a existing Linux distro for such a thing (striped down fit in like 20mb, or even CD based). If something like that existed, people could chose the HW they want (be it Pentium w/ 16mb of ram or Dual Athlon 1ghz with HW RAID), instead of being forced to pay thousands for pretty simple software.

    • Re:NAS Devices in general (Score:3, Informative)

      by tweek ( 18111 )
      Hehe we basically did the same thing.

      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)

    by nuintari ( 47926 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @04:29PM (#3272477) Homepage
    It can suffer from the click of death, AND the blue screen of death! Double bonus!
  • Well, at least Iomega has the foresight to give the customers the options.

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hmmm... My experience with Iomega would not lead me to trust them for online network data. Unreliable storage can cost a lot more than the amount you might save up front.

    What's the big deal anyway? There are plenty of inexpensive *nix NAS devices; for example:
    http://www.snapserver.com/
  • We're just spec'ing out a 40-ish machine rack at work for CPU intensive processing. The existing rig uses cheap no-name PC parts from a relatively local company [supermicro.com], since we bought those a few years ago they've moved to the 1U form factor - these units (which tons of people make) are just the bee's chalfonts , whoever makes 'em ;)

    Slightly off-topic - the DHTML is b0rked in mozilla; a quick search at
    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! :) 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>

  • Does the device follow any standard protocol?
  • What does it matter whether the NAS runs Linux or Windows ? I've never used NAS devices, but I'm just assuming it's a big networked hard drive, right ? Why would it need a user-oriented operating system ? All it needs to do is read and write bits from network to disk and vice-versa, with a little management on the side. It doesn't need a full blown operating system to do that.
    • You need software capable of controlling disks, using the network, providing some sort of configuration ability, and implementing NFS and SMB.

      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.]
      • Well, if I were selling a 10k$ wheel, I'd reinvent it A-to-Z to make it perfectly suited to its task. In this case, I'd probably build something around a StrongARM core (or many), tailored to do precisely one thing : serve files. Port samba and NFS over, that's fine. Design your own direct ethernet circuitry, hooked into a simplified, high-throughput bus. Yes it's alot of work on the drawing board, but the money you invest in R&D will be saved tenfold on implementation costs and your profits will soar.
        • Besides the R&D costs, you now also need to provide software support to your customers. Additionally, when the next generation of hardware arrives, you have to port and debug your little OS all by yourself.

          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.]
  • Is there any site/publication that reviews NAS units? My company is looking at using them heavily in a mixed NT/Solaris setup. We have run into some problems with the windows based units, and it would be nice if someone could tell us ahead of time which units suck, and which, well, don't.

    W

  • Sigh...enough about COD. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chanc_Gorkon ( 94133 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <nokrog>> on Tuesday April 02, 2002 @06:47PM (#3273433)
    COD happened YEARS ago. Like OVER 5! I have had two Zip drives myself and can't say anything bad about them. One was the SLOW parallel port one that got knocked around cuz I took it back and forth to work. For the last two round of PC upgrades at work, all machines have had Zip drives installed. Zips in a user base af about 1500-3000 computers. I talk to the PC guys alot (I am mainframe/UNIX dude). I have heard NOTHING about Zip drive failures. Creative Labs Infra CD-ROM drives sucked and I heard about it too (especially since my boss had one...thing would suck the tray back in immedeately after ejecting it). Over 1500 drives in service with not much failing...it either means they just work, or they ain't using em. The Iomega COD think comes back every time Iomega releases a new thing. Yeah they made mistakes, but I think they have done well. Yeah, the clik disk/HipZip did suck, but only cuz it took them too long to develop it and by the time the 40 MB disks came out, CF cards were well above the 40 MB mark and cheaper then they once were. I just got a 128 MB CF card for my camera and it was only about 90 bucks (could have had it for 80, but I was lazy). Clik was just too little to late and Iomega ain't the only company to do this. This bash Iomega because of a problem 5 years ago is getting a little freaking old.
  • AS per usual something hal;f decent and we can't get it in the good ole United States Of Europe.

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