4-Bay 1U NAS with redundant power supplies

Saytan · 13 Feb 2018 at 16:35

My company has a satellite site where we've been using an old netgear readynas to provide iscsi storage for the local VMware host. Unfortunately the poor thing is getting a bit long in the tooth and flakey with it, and it needs replacing

has anybody deployed anything similar recently with positive results?

Thanks!

Conanius · 13 Feb 2018 at 19:37

It depends massively how plug and play you want this to be, but I'd recommend something like an entry level Dell R430. They do dual PSU and dual on board SD cards so you can have a mirrored pair and run something like FreeNAS on it.

We use R430's as our small ESX hosts with dual xeons and 192GB RAM with dual PSUs and those dual SD cards I spoke of. Very happy with them.

Caged · 14 Feb 2018 at 16:24

Is it just one host?

Saytan · 14 Feb 2018 at 16:46

Caged said:
Is it just one host?

Yep. Local bays all full though.

Tbh the whole setup is a bit Mickey but we've no budget to speak of for it

Caged · 14 Feb 2018 at 16:49

Was going to say.

Either just throw a PERC card in and use a 2U SAS enclosure, or grab something running Storage Server like an HP/Dell NAS and export iSCSI targets from there - https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA4-7477ENW&doctype=white paper&doclang=EN_US&searchquery=&cc=us&lc=en

Other option is https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/RS818+, depending how you feel about these sorts of products.

If you use NFS rather than iSCSI then you can browse the datastores as a network share. Might be useful for backups.