Netgear Introduces Linux-Based NAS Devices

drewmoney writes "A LinuxDevices.com article introduces several of Netgear's Linux-based NAS devices, technology they acquired with the purchase of Infrant earlier this year. (Here is Netgear's product page.) There are models from 1.5 TB, at about $1,100, to 4 TB, topped by a 4-TB rack-mount version. They are geared towards the professional home user and small and medium businesses. The NAS devices come complete with the usual RAID features, file-system access, and a built in USB print server. All are controlled through a Web GUI and some even offer SSH access."

But they're made for Windows users

[arth1]

No NFS = No purchase.

It doesn't matter if they run Linux internally, if all they basically do is samba, for Windows users (and Linux users who have adjusted to a Windows environment). I want NFS, POSIX attributes and remote fam. Which is perfectly feasible and even easy to implement on a Linux device. But the market is of course Windows users.

OpenVPN

[b0s0z0ku]

I hope that they include something like OpenVPN that allows clients from almost every platform and is very flexible as far as setup. Secure remote access is very important.

-b.

Re:I'm sick to death of four stupid drives

[glwtta]

when only a complete moron would run these things as a single JBOD volume without any fault tolerance

RAID10 is a perfectly legitimate configuration for a great many applications; redundancy isn't the only reason people get RAID devices, you know.

Anyway, I think it's a fairly limited audience that wants more than 3TB in a cheap-ass desk-side thingy. Seriously, you'd want an 8x1TB RAID5 array on a single, "consumer grade" power supply? Might as well run it as JBOD (actually, that would probably be safer). By the time you get 8 drives in there, you probably want something along the lines of this [promise.com], with crazy things like a real RAID controller, redundant power , etc. (and doesn't put your 8 drive array behind a dinky GigE interface). It's five times more expensive (sans drives), but you get what you pay for (all things considered, it's still cheap and far from "Enterprise").

Since those who want the maximum amount of space for the absolute lowest price can build their own so easily, who are they going to sell these to?

So, my guess is that they just can't make these things as expandable as you suggest and still be able to sell them for ~$500 to the majority of their customers.

Re:I'm sick to death of four stupid drives

[JoeShmoe]

RAID 10 *has* redundancy so I don't really understand that example as a counterpoint. Yes, there are some high-end desktops that come configured with RAID-0 arrays for performance but nobody could possibly want to do that with a NAS. I'm pretty sure the network would be a chokepoint well before you reached the performance level of unstriped drives.

I think there's a decent-sized audience that wants a *practical* way to get a couple of terabytes. Who wants to spring for three or four brand new 1TB drives to populate a NAS? Most people I know are swimming in 300-500GB drives. If there was a NAS that could support more than four drives, you could get a couple terabytes out of them. Power isn't a problem either. If you string devices together, chaining them or using eSATA, then they can all have their own consumer-level power supplies.

eSATA and SAS were built to be expandable, so I think it's really just a "640K is enough" attitude that because the first NAS devices were probably IDE and limited to four devices, every come-along company to jump into the NAS market decides to copy what's out there instead of realizing that with the switch to SATA, the four-drive limit just doesn't make a lot of sense.

These things also cost a lot more than ~$500 because most come with drives and not bare-bones. So, if someone is going to plunk down $1000-$2000, I think they might like to pay a few bucks extra to get an external expansion port or extra drive bay.

-JoeShmoe
.

ZFS offers the same features + others

[this great guy]

With ZFS you can also dynamically expand your pool by replacing drives one-by-one with larger ones, no matter what the current pool configuration is: combination of stripes, mirrors, raidz, raidz2. You can also expand a pool by adding a new "vdev" to it. A vdev can be a single drive or a N-drive mirror/raidz/raidz2. There is one thing you can't do (yet): dynamically reconfigure a N-drive raidz/raidz2 vdev to a (N+1)-drive vdev.

Also, RAID-X doesn't seem to implement snapshots, quotas, reservations, compression, end-to-end checksumming, etc. I fail to see how RAID-X would interest ZFS users, did I miss something ?

Re:No mention of FreeNAS yet?

[cerberusss]

Can't beat it if you have an old PC laying about.

It's easy to beat. People often forget about the power usage of a PC. That thing is bleeding 100 to 300 watts and that probably makes the Netgear equipment much cheaper.

Re:No mention of FreeNAS yet?

[Kjella]

I doubt even fullblown gaming rigs draws 300W at idle unless you got a hefty SLI setup. Above and beyond the disks which the NAS has to power too, it's basicly CPU+GPU+mobo. Make that integrated graphics and the GPU goes away. The hardware came "free" in that it's used components with low resale value. Of course, if you don't plan to take advantage of anything else than as a file server it might be a close call, if you're slightly more advanced it's a no-brainer in my opinion.