Recomend me a cheap NAS as an ISCSI target

[robk]

I need accelerate a virtualisation project that we have been looking at for some time.

I had been planning to put in a pair of VMhosts with some local storage to move print services etc off some of our older servers.

It appears however that our intranet server may require upgrading sooner than I had planned.

Therefore I now need to look for some storage.

I am considering something along the lines of a Netgear ReadyNAS 2100 or Qsnap unit.

Looking for CIFS/ISCSI support and min 1Tb storage, solution needs to be off the shelf rather than home build. Netgear’s 5 Year warranty looks good.

What would be people’s recommendations?

I have in mind a vmware esxi instance of 2008R2 with the inetpub folder on a iscsi target.

[m25man]

Your post says it all, Cheap NAS off the shelf - both the ReadyNAS and QNAP will do the job.

I'm a great ReadyNAS fan and the pricing has got better and better of late but we tend to only really use the 2100's as backup or replication targets.
The RN2100 and the similar QNap boxes are both up to the smaller virtualisation tasks that your currently looking at however longer term for the larger deployments including CSV use in Hyper-V environments the better 12 bay chassis is where you want to put your money.

The SuperMicro Chassis and Infrant Pedigree along with the ability to add more Dual Port adapters and 10GBe support makes the 3200/4200 the better choice.
We have several sites running 12 bay ReadyNas as CSV's in 3 node fail over clusters the 12 spindles seems to cope admirably with the workloads loads including Exchange/Sims and all of the File servers VMs for a split site with over 1500 users.
You would be better off to buy a RN3200 with 6 drives and add some more later.

The 2100's work well enough when used as locally attached iscsi storage but I wouldn't recommend the 4 bay units with the limited CPU power for anything too demanding.
I have a 6 Bay RN Pro hooked up to a Dual Quad VM Host here we use for testing and we abuse it rotten.

You will find our video case studies on the Netgear UK site somewhere or PM me and I will send you a link to them on good old YouTube.

The only negative rep I can give them at present is their RALUS agent for Backup Exec doesn't work properly yet, so if you intend to use a ReadyNAS as a network filestore directly which it's also really good at, make sure you have a decent backup plan that doesn't involve Backup Exec as this is a real pain at the moment.

The 5 Year warranty is the cherry on top.

[synaesthesia]

We've had great success with Buffallo Terastations - not long ago £700 bought a 4tb unit and with 4 x 2tb drives thrown in we still had something that romped through it's task well. Set up with link aggregation speed is damned good, but w2003 doesnt like that much on iscsi

[mb2k01]

QNAP all the way for me, after trying many of the similar level ones.
Feature packed devices, great prices - and to give EduGeek a bit of love, if I hadn't been skimming through threads here I would never have heard of them!

[robk]

Thanks for the info! I have used Buffallo Terastations in the past for backup storage and not had much luck with them.

Costs on the Readynas 3200 are a little prohibitive, but the 2100 at just under £1K is a good price.

Not seen much in the way of Qnap pricing yet. @mb2k01 what do you use yours for?

[mb2k01]

@robk I got my first one for pure file storage, nothing too fancy.
After playing around, the built in features such as file server, media station, ftp server, web server etc all worked really well.
I now have about 4 of them dotted around the place for a mix of storage / feature requirements. My only minor complaint if QNAP end up reading this, is the media streaming 'site' could do with a bit of dev - accept more media types for conversion / speed up a bit.

On prices, its probably fair to say they are priced towards the lower end of the market. As far as I'm concerned this has no relevance on features/reliability though.
Search results for QNAP in Network / Ethernet / Wireless Hard Drives (NAS)

[Millgate]

I agree with MB2K01. I've had a client with almost the exact same request recently and he went with Qnap. Off the top of my head, I can't think which model he went with in the end but I'll post that in the morning. Very good price.

If you need any info about the Qnap (or others) i can arrange conf calls etc for you so you can tell them exactly what your after and they can tell you what you need.

I'll post the model tomorrow with the price

Cheers

[RTFM]

We put in a netgear piece of storage at a primary school we support which supports iscsi, think they got 4tb for under £1500.

[pcstru]

I'll add to the others, a Theucs 1u4600r. Around the same price as the Netgear (possibly a bit cheaper) but with a redundant power supply. We have three Thecus units - two i4500's and an 8800pro and they have been totally reliable.

[edutech4schools]

QNAP would be my choice.

[TronXP]

We just recently got a QNAP TS-809U-RP Turbo NAS, 16Tb of storage for around £2500. I must say for what it is I have been very impressed, some of the built in features are excellent and it joined up to our domain first time without a hitch.

[Millgate]

As promised, this is what i would recommend.

Qnap TS-219P+/2TB - this is a 2TB Turbo Nas with a 2 year warranty.It supports iSCSI and it comes with 2 x 1TB drives installed with a max of 4TB. All for less than £350 ex vat with free shipping NBD.

Hope this helps!

Cheers

[plexer]

1 x Qnap TS-859U-RP+ 8 Bay no drives NAS Rack £1340.00 - £1340.00
8 x Western Digital RE4 1TB 3.5" SATA Internal £67.00 - £536.00

Thats what I'm going for allthough this is a backup target.

Ben

[gshaw]

Anyone had any issues with iSCSI dropouts on the QNAP boxes? Was looking at one last week but our supplier, Veeam support and a few other people all warned about iSCSI software issues...

[Arthur]

What about the Iomega PX Series NASs? They are all VMware certified for NFS and iSCSI so you shouldn't have any issues with ESXi. The PX6-300d costs around £565 + VAT without disks.