Why We Designed Our Own Nas Servers For Use In Our Data Center

Why We Designed Our Own NAS Servers For Use In Our Data Center

Summary: Over the past few years, we at Technetium, Inc. have had the opportunity to deal with Snap because of our model Snap servers. One day we installed new managed switches and the Snap Web-based management console would no longer operate. It would just hang at gigabit speed. To make a long story short, after exhausting all of my options on the Internet, I sent Snap technical support an email to try and resolve the problem. Here is their response:

Your case, ...

nas, nas server, freenas, network attached storage, network storage, SAN

Article Body: Over the past few years, we at Technetium, Inc. have had the opportunity to deal with Snap because of our model Snap servers. One day we installed new managed switches and the Snap Web-based management console would no longer operate. It would just hang at gigabit speed. To make a long story short, after exhausting all of my options on the Internet, I sent Snap technical support an email to try and resolve the problem. Here is their response:

Your case, , was updated. Please refer to the information below for our response. Please Click here if you need additional support on this issue.

Please do not reply to this email as it will not be seen by a live representative.

Your Query:

I have snap s and they will not negotiate tx to my Dell Powerconnect switch. I'm afraid to set the nic in debug to anything other than auto.

It also shows half duplex when the switch shows full duplex.

Thank you in advance,

Todd Foster

Our Response:

Good morning Todd.

Again this is not technical support. We can be reached on a pay-per-incident of $. through our numbers: -- and --.

Sincerely, Adaptec Customer Service

To my dismay, they wanted $ just to talk to me, and my bet is they wanted another $, or so to upgrade the software. On their Website I could not find any way to buy support for this model any more. And by the way, to add replication between of their Snap servers, it would cost something like $, per box.

So, here we are, with boxes, no support, and I'll bet that you can't even buy parts for it any more from Snap, much less anywhere else (maybe eBay?).

Off we go to buy new NAS replacements. Originally these 's were $K apiece, for roughly TB of storage. All things being equal, I should be able to buy a NAS box for really cheap (yeah right!). What I found was that a high-quality NAS system that would do RAID would cost between $, and ,, not to mention that a TB Snap would be over $K. That is when we decided to build our own NAS servers!

With a great backround in PC/server hardware, it was easy for me to pick top-quality hardware and brand name components. I still have Pentium Pro servers that work! I chose the best hardware, put it in a rack mount server case, and voila! I have a NAS server. Here is the list of components:

FreeNAS redone to work with the hardware that we provide Kingwin in Multi-Drive Bay SATA Internal Hot Swap Mobile Rack, w/ Key Lock, LED Indicator & Two mm Cooling Fans SONY Beige DDU Internal EIDE X DVD-ROM Drive Enermax ELTAWT W Power Supply U IPC- Rackmount Chassis Server Case - Beige Color Transcend TSMCFI-D flash card ea. Seagate(STNS)GB SATA .Gb/s RPM MB Buff Hard drive Addonics ADSACFW CF to SATA adapter SUPERMICRO|MBD-PDSME+ WARE SE-LPML SATAII RAID controller INTEL XEON .G M Gx|Kingston DII KVRDNK/G

We need an OS now, and for that I picked FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org) which runs on FreeBSD. You can't ask for a more stable operating system. And by the way, the FreeNAS OS runs from memory and boots from a CF card (no chance of the hard drive crashing and destroying the config). This custom built NAS system has turned out great, and our client is very pleased with the money we saved them.