Need Help With NAS - Storage Advice Before I buy

[HelloWill]

Hey everyone!

 

I need some advice or feedback... We are a fast growing company that is outgrowing our storage needs, and are looking to upgrade.

We are looking for a scalable storage solution that can:

 

• Grow with us and is easy to scale and maintain.
  
• Support different storage pools with different speeds and configurations to be tuned for our specific user needs (see below)...
  

Designers:

Work with large files such as psd, ia, and a little bit of video

Video Editors:

Work with everything from HD to 6k footage and need a lot of bandwidth for editing with streams from the storage server

 

Business User:

Work with standard business apps and files such as excel, pdf, keynote, ppt, etc...

 

So the storage must be configured to all us to meet the needs of video, design, business storage, and dumb storage (archiving and backup).

The system are looking real hard at is iXsystem for a TrueNAS unit. We posted a few questions about storage here, but I would like your opinion about the specs and if you think this solution is an excellent one. Have in mind that our main requirements are: easy to manage, easy and cheap to scale (grow as we grow).

* TrueNAS Z35 3U (ZFS - NFS, CIFS, HTTP, FTP, iSCSI, AFP - Snapshots, Compression, Shadow Migration, Cloning, Remote Replication)

- 16 x 3.5" Caching SAS Drive Bays

- 256 RAM

- TrueNAS Extreme-Performance Write Cache (SZR)

- TrueNAS High-Performance Read Cache: 800GB SSD

- TrueNAS 10 Gigabit Quad Port Controller

- Zpool #1 - VM OS Storage - (5 x 400GB SSD) - 2 x 400GB vdevs in RAID10 + 1 x 400GB Hot Spare ~745GB Usable

- Zpool #2 - Fast Storage (38 x 4TB SAS) - 18 vdevs (4TB Mirrors) in RAID10 + 2 x 4TB Hot Spares ~64.8TB Usable

-Zpool #3 - Backup Repository (24 x 4TB SAS) - 4 x 16TB vdevs (5 x 4TB) in RAIDZ + 2 x 4TB Hot Spares ~58.4TB Usable

Questions:

This system is being quoted for around $90k. What do you think about the company, system, and specs? Fair Priced?

How is ZFS file systems for a NAS/SAN and would it meet all our needs or is there a better option that you might know of?

What concerns would you have?

Can it scale well?

Is there a much cheaper solution that we should look hard at?

 

Thanks again and would love any feedback / suggestions (even willing to pay for consulting)

Cheers!

[Tallwood_6]

Not heard of that vendor, the hardware specs sound impressive but that says nothing for the software, reliability, scalability or support.

Be temped to look at some more well known all flash or hybrid vendors myself. Nimble, nimbus, netapp etc

[bossman]

@HelloWill:

 

Have you had a look at this company: https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/RS3614xs+

 

I don't know if it is exactly what you looking for but they suite our storage requirements and they are scalable and meet most of your criterion and are possibly cheaper than you are being quoted from this other company, we have the above model and are looking to purchase another 2 with hybrid mix of SSDs for the cache and large capacity HDDs SATA drives for the storage of non critical files.

 

It might be worth your while if only for advice

[kmount]

I'd say it's a very good price looking at the raw hardware. (One thing I didn't see in your message was whether you had budgeted for it to be the HA model?)

 

I wouldn't worry about the brand name too much; it seems they have a long list of impressive 'client relationships' (I'd look to qualify whether that means customer or friend).

 

It's ZFS based so you'll benefit from all the goodness that brings to the party, the chunk of RAM will help with the ARC (read cache) and the SSDs will help with the read (L2ARC)/write cache (ZIL). More info explaining that - ZFS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

The disks will be 7.2k RPM so by themselves won't deliver blistering performance but ZFS will help with that considerably.

 

Before we go much further I'd like to understand your needs a little better...

 

The files you're working with:

 

1) How big are they? (and how many are in use concurrently)

2) How many IOPs do you need to meet your demands (this is a capacity planning exercise, if you've not done it, do it before you buy anything!)

3) Have you established the ratio between read/write in your current environment?

 

Sorry for the questions, keen to understand your needs more to see whether you need to take anything else into consideration.

[markcuk]

I work for a production company and we currenty use a nexsan san for our 4k/5k editing

 

we have 2 metadata controlers (mac pro)

1x 42 bay nexsan satabeast https://www.imation.com/en/nexsan/

use metasan by metaSAN – Tiger Technology

 

3x edit mac's connected by 4gb fibre to the san

4x Graphic mac's connected to the san by 1gb lan

 

we edit red epic, BMC, canon 4k raw footage

 

we are looking to move forward and have looked at the following

 

Facilis Technology Inc. » TerraBlock

 

Tiger Box – Tiger Technology

 

and using nexstor

 

you have to be good at archiving!

[Oddbod]

The past video company I worked for used promise raid for their San with Final Cut Server to serve six HD edit suites, a colour grading booth and thirty admin desks. I know FCTServer is a bit long in the tooth now, so I would suggest the replacement from axle media (http://ww.axlemedia.com) to handle your video and DAM. The other system I would consider just for ease of use and scalability is active storage. This company used to be apple's Xserve division before apple chose a new direction. See http://www.active-storage.com/activeraid.php