Creating Massive Network Shares with FreeNAS?

[Twitch504c]

Hello Everyone,

Currently My Problem is I have a bunch of Small NAS servers served up as different network drives to most users in my windows enviroment. My problem is this we have about 240tb of Space spread out over 15 servers. (Previous admin would just add a new NAS server when there we getting close to full)

What i would like to try to do is consolidate down to say 8 Servers. and Present it as one Network Drive. My question is this possible with freenas by itself?

My idea was each of the server will contain 24x 3tb Drives in RAIDZ2. Serving about 66TB from each box. From there i was Serve the 66TB To a FreeNas Box acting as a kind of Filer Head for the 8 Boxes and run RAIDz2 Across 8x ISCSI Drives giving me a combined total of 396TB of Space.

Im trying to figure out of this is even worth the Effort or not. The head Server would have 6 10G Ports (4 for the Other FreeNAS boxes and 2 for LAN Connectivity) and Each FreeNas box would have 2 10G Ports each (for multipath).

Ive been told this can be done with Window's NameSpaces but this would require additionally licensing Id rather spend the money on the hardware.

FreeNAS (HeadUnit)
|
|-FreeNAS DiskUnit 1
|-FreeNAS DiskUnit 2
|-FreeNAS DiskUnit n


I personally used FreeNAS before as SAN Devices for VM Hosts and Singular Network Drives. But the space requirements for this new job are way out of range from what I am used to.

Also NetApp and EMC are out of the question because of pricing.

 

[cyberjock]

Not possible to have 8 servers share out as "1 big server".

My advice is to do cost analysis of your current setup against the cost of going with a few large servers. Often it's cost effective, sometimes its not.

I know someone that is using Namespace. He said its one of those things that works brilliantly or comes crashing down on you. They haven't lost any data from it or had to recover from backup, but he complained that data was sometimes unavailable until you fixed it. And troubleshooting it is quite difficult as there's a lot of complexity involved with troubleshooting something that is distributed.

 

[ZFS Noob]

Sounds like a job for Redhat Clustered Storage. They'll make you pay $5,000 per pair of nodes each year for licensing though, so maybe figuring out and implementing Gluster on your own would make more sense.

 

[cyberjock]

Sounds like a job for Redhat Clustered Storage. They'll make you pay $5,000 per pair of nodes each year for licensing though, so maybe figuring out and implementing Gluster on your own would make more sense.

Whoa.. spend money! You are now in the penalty box mister!

 

[Twitch504c]

I forgot completely that gluster existed . Going to attempt to use that


Thanks

 

[TheSmoker]

Or you can mount some iscsi/nfs shares on a single server and re-share from there...

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[benamira]

For this huge amount of storage and depending on the use case and how important the info is, you should even consider an enterprise solution, like ISILON (from EMC), One FS, you can start from few GB and grow to 20 Pbytes, it's just one filesystem, you can export CIFS, NFS or even iSCSI and HDFS, you can grow transparently without disruption and you have the support from a big company as EMC.

How many users are accessing the NAS share, do you have any special performance requirements??

You have to measure all the "hidden" costs for this amount of storage if you DIY: like RMAs, management, drive replacements...