Does anyone user the Netgear ReadyNas 2100

[awesomeo3000]

I'm looking to implement a few ideas..

Increase storage, virualize some servers and improve the backup system.

 

Looking around the site i see there's lots of support for the sun 7110 for a more industrial solution, but this is going to be out of my price range, and so i've been looking at the readynas 2100, maybe getting two and using one to back the other up to a different area of the site. It which seems to provide a variety of features, iscsi targeting, lots of space and for a pretty low price.

 

Does anyone have any current experience with these units, in particular using the iscsi feature, how they cope with a lot of activity, say if users areas were stored on there?

 

thanks for any ideas...

[AngryTechnician]

I've got one, but I'm not using it for the same sort of thing you are - I'm using it as the storage pool for my Data Protection Manager server, so while it gets fairly constant use, it's not an especially heavy load. It's located on the opposite side of the site from the server room, and the small size meant I could fit it into a networking cabinet along with a small UPS rather than needing a full server cabinet.

 

I am using iSCSI, which seems to work just as well as any other device I've used (had one unexplained drop in 5 months, but 99% certain it was the initiator's fault not the NAS). On the 4TB model in X-RAID configuration (the default) you'll get 2747 GB to allocate as iSCSI targets. AFAIK you can have as many targets as you need (I'm only using 2) but the max target size is 2000 GB, so you can't make it one single target.

 

Personally I would use something beefier for what you're planning, but that's more of a gut feeling - I actually can't fault the kit so far. If you have any other questions, ask away.

[awesomeo3000]

thanks for that, you've also answered my next question which was about the iscsi target sizes. I'd seen the 2tb limit on the netgear site but wasn't sure if that applied to the 4/8tb models too.

 

Think i may have to keep looking for now, maybe try and find more money too!!

[farmeunit]

We've been looking at something similar, not sure exactly which ReadyNAS model, but we are also looking at an Iomega product.

 

Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d NAS Server - NAS server and other Workgroup NAS Servers at CDWG.com

 

It is apparently VMWare certified, although I'm sure the other will handle it. It's a bit cheaper than the ReadyNAS we were looking at.