Hello Everyone,

Is there any preferred appliance used as NAS file services gateway to equallogic’s arrays, besides windows storage server?

Thanks,
Guillermo

Hello,

No. A NAS server that supports MPIO would be best, redundancy + performance. I.e. RH5.x or CentOS 5.x would be a good choice. I use Ubuntu 8.04 w/Samba/NFS/rsync etc....

Not every OS supports MPIO and relies on teaming or bonding interfaces. Which will work but not provide additional bandwidth.

-don

When I searched for NAS Gateways it seems that this appliances only connects disk arrays via FC SAN, I didn`t find any NAS Gateway appliance that can connect disk arrays via IP SAN (iSCSSI).

Openfiler is one example of a NAS head with iSCSI backend support.

I haven't checked is FreeNAS does or not.

-don

After recent Dell acquisition maybe in a near future NAS gateway for Equallogic arrays will developed with Exanet technology

Re: Exanet that's true. My impression was you were looking for low cost / no cost solutions. The exanet stuff is very high end indeed.

One I'm just starting to experiment with is the Nexenta Project. http://www.nexenta.org/ That includes an ESX ready VM. The Web interface is very nice. The free version supports 12TB of in use space and it does connect to EQL arrays. Does NFS v4/v3/v2, CFS, rsync, WebDAV, etc.. It's a WIP but does offer ZFS which is a pretty scalable filesystem with some amazing features, dedup, compression, etc...

There's the commercial version as well http://www.nexenta.com

Regards,

-don

"Re: Exanet that's true. My impression was you were looking for low cost / no cost solutions. The exanet stuff is very high end indeed.

One I'm just starting to experiment with is the Nexenta Project. http://www.nexenta.org/ That includes an ESX ready VM. The Web interface is very nice. The free version supports 12TB of in use space and it does connect to EQL arrays. Does NFS v4/v3/v2, CFS, rsync, WebDAV, etc.. It's a WIP but does offer ZFS which is a pretty scalable filesystem with some amazing features, dedup, compression, etc...

There's the commercial version as well http://www.nexenta.com

Regards,

-don
"

There is a rumor about a new iSCSI NAS Gateway from Equallogic with a nice price maybe in the next year.

Could be. Don't know.

-don

NexentaStor works with Equallogic arrays, as noted. It may be interesting to note given recent news that NexentaStor is also tightly integrated with Compellent to provide its NAS capabilities. NexentaStor can talk iSCSI, FC, AoE at the backend and present NFS, CIFS, FTP, etc. out the front. And more recently it has been shown that NexentaStor can provide extremely high performing cloud storage:
http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/technology/kts-private-cloud-faster-than-amazon-rackspace?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+neoTactics+(Cloudscaling)