NAS for Mac environment
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This seems to be a good option giving me a usable space of 5TB with dual disk redundancy.
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Just listing what I find useful for me, might be a good starting point for someone else in the future.
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Keep in mind that the B800i is SATA only. SAS drive options do not exist until you use the B1200i.
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We use the B800i behind our XenServer in the lab. Works really well. We are on RAID 6 (dual redundancy as they call it) of course.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Ambarishrh said:
How does it work with MAC?
Macs talk the same protocols as everyone else. SMB first, NFS second and AFP deprecated but included. There is no concept of "storage for Mac" anymore. That's an old idea.
The only thing to be aware of is the Finder issue and that plagues all non-Mac native storage equally.
This is good to know...
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@scottalanmiller said:
- Give up on file sharing and move to SAN + clustered filesystem like SAN-MP so that you are using a Mac-managed HFS+ system.
I can only imagine how expensive that would be!
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
- Give up on file sharing and move to SAN + clustered filesystem like SAN-MP so that you are using a Mac-managed HFS+ system.
I can only imagine how expensive that would be!
It's not horrible, presumably because you go cheap on the SAN side. SAN and NAS are the same price, so you aren't losing a lot there. SAN-MP is in the same price range as a good Finder replacement. So we aren't talking about anything crazy. But not cheap like Windows or Linux would be.
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Hi all
Just an update on this:
Found one vendor in Dubai and seems like they are the only one for Drobo through out the GCC!
I asked for a demo unit and they dont have B800i, and instead they were suggesting me to check Drobo Mini/ an alternate device which i guess is their custom device as there are no specs/details on their site.
Not sure if a Drobo mini is a good idea for 30-50 users working on Photoshop with big image files.
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@Ambarishrh said:
Not sure if a Drobo mini is a good idea for 30-50 users working on Photoshop with big image files.
Ha ha. The Drobo Mini is not a SAN, it's a single user external drive device. Yes, it is a full RAID unit with four drives in it (all 2.5" SATA) but it is a direct attach only and is designed to be exactly the same as a really nice external USB drive except faster with RAID protection. That's all. Super high end USB drive.
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Thanks! I will speak to them to get a B800i, the single vendor for the whole region is a bit worrying.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Ambarishrh said:
Not sure if a Drobo mini is a good idea for 30-50 users working on Photoshop with big image files.
Ha ha. The Drobo Mini is not a SAN, it's a single user external drive device. Yes, it is a full RAID unit with four drives in it (all 2.5" SATA) but it is a direct attach only and is designed to be exactly the same as a really nice external USB drive except faster with RAID protection. That's all. Super high end USB drive.
I suppose you could plug that into a Mac Mini and use it with a file server. Personally, I'd run some monitoring for 24-48 hrs to get the IOPS they need.
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If you use the Drobo B800i you have a SAN that goes onto the network and you can use software like SAN-MP to share it between nodes. With a Drobo Mini you just have a USB or Thunderbolt DAS drive with SSDs or laptop drives in it. You would attach that directly to a Mac Mini and use the Mac Mini as a NAS head to share out the storage. So the cost and complexity of using the Drobo Mini is much higher. Very different approaches.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Ambarishrh said:
Not sure if a Drobo mini is a good idea for 30-50 users working on Photoshop with big image files.
Ha ha. The Drobo Mini is not a SAN, it's a single user external drive device. Yes, it is a full RAID unit with four drives in it (all 2.5" SATA) but it is a direct attach only and is designed to be exactly the same as a really nice external USB drive except faster with RAID protection. That's all. Super high end USB drive.
I suppose you could plug that into a Mac Mini and use it with a file server. Personally, I'd run some monitoring for 24-48 hrs to get the IOPS they need.
That would be the intended use (we hope.)
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Drobo B800i: Rack mounted 3U SAN, 8x 3.5" SATA bays in RAID 6 for up to 48TB of usable SAN storage, but very slow. Connects over GigE iSCSI.
Drobo Mini: External hard drive form factor DAS 4x 2.5" SATA bays in RAID 5 (if SSD) or RAID 6 (if spinning rust) for up to about 1.5TB of usable capacity connecting over USB 3 or Thunderbolt and very fast (if using SSDs.)
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Drobo Mini:
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The Drobo Mini has an additional fifth drive, the mSATA SSD cache slot. This allows you to put 4x laptop spinning 2.5" drives in the hot swap bays in RAID 6 (RAID 5 would be too risky by far) for up to around 2TB of usable capacity while the mSATA provides a caching mechanism to speed up the most commonly accessed bits. It is a very nice feature, but because it accelerates only four SATA bays, the overall design is not so useful as the total capacity is so limited. Better to use 4x SSD than 4x spinning plus a cache because with all SSD you can utilize RAID 5 for better capacity and speed options.
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Drobo B800i SAN:
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Sadly the B800i lacks a cache or tiering option to leverage some SSD to really speed things up. To get this you have to move up to the B1200i which is quite a leap in price and moves you to hard core tiering with 9x RAID 6 spinning drives (an increase of about 15% in total maximum capacity), the option to use SAS instead of SATA (for a leap in base performance if so desired) and three bays of RAID 5 tiering for SSDs with gives you more performance, better protection and double the high speed tier capacity of the Drobo Mini. The B1200i also has more redundancy than the other options with a dual power supply option, is directly rack mountable (no kit needed) and has more robust networking options for the SAN connections.
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The idea is to use the B800i added to a mac mini server and enable file sharing. If not the B800i what could be the next best option?
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@Ambarishrh said:
The idea is to use the B800i added to a mac mini server and enable file sharing. If not the B800i what could be the next best option?
If you are definitely going to use the Mac Mini as a NAS head / file server then the direct connect (DAS) option is not a limiting factor, that's actually an improvement. The question would be, does 4x SATA 2.5" provide enough capacity to meet your needs? If so the Drobo Mini + Mac Mini combination might be very good.
