It’s been a while since I looked at what’s new in the software/server based SAN/NAS world. Last time I looked was probably 2-3 years ago and I ended up with NexentaStor Community 3 as it was the most complete, stable and feature rich SAN OS at the time.
Fast forward to 2014, there’s been tremendous developments in software based SAN systems, seems like days of Hardware RAID are numbered as pretty much every major SAN/NAS distro is pushing ZFS as the de-facto solution.
The goal here is to find a more up-to-date SAN so I can possibly replace NexentaStor in production assuming it offers more features or provides better performance.
Required Features:
* Email notification on disk failure
* Web UI managed
* High performance
* Stable
* NFS/CIFS(SMB)
Nice to have features:
* Embedded install (USB/CF)
* ZFS
* iSCSI (MPIO would be nice)
* Performance monitoring
Test Hardware:
HP SE316M1 (DL160) G6
1x Intel Xeon X5550
20GB DDR3 ECC RAM
6x 160GB 10K Velociraptors (to be replaced for prod)
1x OCZ Agility 60GB SSD (cache device, test use only)
Dual Intel NIC
LSI SAS2008-IT HBA (By Dell) or LSI 1068E-IR SAS HBA (whichever is supported)
On to the testing…