How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 4: Ubuntu Server

I haven't seen anywhere whether or not you tried NFS vs. CIFS/Samba. I, personally have not experimented with it, but the geek boards I frequent swear it is faster/more efficient.

Just throwing it out there........

Madal

[thiggins]

No NFS. I am not playing with FTP either right now.

Have you thought about comparing with the free tools available ?
Like FreeNas and OpenFiler ?

I have done a similar system, hating to throw out perfectly good old computers, I've built a small San for my small company.

We use an old enterprise class quad xeon Compaq Server with 4 Gigabit cards and 2 professional Raid controllers.
The system has 12 internal drives and 2 libaries of 18 disks, all 10K 36g SCSI disks.

With openfiler we found that it performs better as an I-SCSI target for our wmware cluster as 48 single drives in software raid performed by openfiler, than using the internal raid controllers.

We did some testing with both raid 10 and 5. In raid 10 theres little difference, but using raid 5 theres allmost 25% better performance from using sw raid.

I'd be interested to see if you would gain anything from openfiler / freenas.

Jeppe, Denmark.

[Khayam]

I'd be very interested in seeing RAID5 stats for the Ubuntu box.

If you are ever able to setup run those tests I'd love to see them.

[thiggins]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Have you thought about comparing with the free tools available ?
Like FreeNas and OpenFiler ?

Well, Ubuntu Server is free. I ran both FreeNAS and Ubuntu on the Atom NAS and found Ubuntu had better performance.
Checking out OpenFiler is on my To Do list.

[epoch1970]

Tim,
I guess there are a lot of casual buyers/users out there who do not exactly need the performance edge that RAID is supposed to bring. And merging devices at block-level, like with RAID or LVM, requires -should require- continuous system supervision, that's a drag.

I am experimenting with a low-power, low-performance , low-maintenance, big iron home server that uses union mounts (aka aufs under linux.) Union merges the contents of directories with the same name, it works at filesystem-level. Although stacking rw drives is not the primary intent of union, it seems to work quite well (performance, overhead, fault-tolerance.) The box has 2 data volumes, the largest being made of 6 dissimilar drives.

[thiggins]

Originally Posted by epoch1970

I am experimenting with a low-power, low-performance , low-maintenance, big iron home server that uses union mounts (aka aufs under linux.)

I guess there are some home/SOHO users who don't care about performance. But with the large media filesizes that many people have today, a slow NAS gets old, real fast.

[jalyst]

Originally Posted by thiggins

Well, Ubuntu Server is free. I ran both FreeNAS and Ubuntu on the Atom NAS and found Ubuntu had better performance.
Checking out OpenFiler is on my To Do list.

if time see if you can squeeze this or related in....
http://www.nexenta.com/corp/index.ph...id=4&Itemid=67

there's a "trial" version that's fully functional...

[corndog]

Hi Tim,

Love this really fast NAS series! I'm adding my vote to the Nexenta test. There's a lot of buzz these days about how OpenSolaris would be our bestest favourite if we'd all just give it a fair shake. Also, There's a lot of storage talk about how zfs is supposed to be the Be-All and End-All of storage. It would be great to see it along side these others.

Also, just for something a little out-of-the-ordinary, have you considered testing UNRAID by Lime Technology? It sounds a little like some of the stuff you saw on WHS but done with a linux base. It's just different enough that it might be worth while to put on here.

And one last item - I realize this gets out of the simple single task NAS realm, but it would be really great to see you run a Windows 2008 Server test on this setup as well. I did some prelim testing with Win 2008 and was blown away by the performance I saw. Didn't have time to do it more rigorously, but I've a suspicion you might get close to your 100megabyte/sec speed with Win2008 Server. I'll admit it pains me to even say this, being a die-hard linux guy, but there it is.

[Bart]

Originally Posted by thiggins

Checking out OpenFiler is on my To Do list.

I must say I'm quite looking forward to this, since I wasn't able to find a single OpenFiler review online yet.

Corndog, UNRAID has already been reviewed on this site, see here. On the other hand, it might be worth it to re-review it and compare the numbers.