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Rebyte NAS

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by snehakesavan

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I am in the process of testing rebyte NAS kit. So far its working good and rebyte is the cheap solution to backup file server,desktops and also it can be configured as file server. Its costing $179 and it can support all RAID (software raid only). So you can customize your own NAS. Rebyte card has linux os on it. I am planning to configure 600 gb nas using three 200 gb under raid5. All the files and folders are backedup in native format. It cannot do open files backup.
Please share your experience about pros and cons of this setup

IKON

3 replies

by kurt90

I would like to get more information on this as well. I have been looking into some form of personal network attached storage (NAS) but what there is for the home market is overpriced and flawed technology.

by gtingle

I have recently acquired a Promise SX8000 loaded with 8 IDE 200GB drives.

I am going to configure 7 of the drives for Raid 5
which will give me 1.2 TB of data storage.

The other 200GB drive will be used as a "hot spare" which will automatically be added to the Raid set in case one of the other raid drives fails.

I am planning to use the SX8000 for backup and archive.

I currently have 2 Windows NT and 3 Windows 2000 production servers on a LAN along with a SCO-Unix box.

I am proposing to place on the LAN a Pentium 3 Server loaded with Windows 2003 Server attached
via a HP Ultra Widee SCSI Adapter.
Also attached to the New 2003 Server will be a Super DLT Tape drive.

I will then use Windows NTBackup on each production server to backup each server's files overnight to specific directories on the SX8000
volume's Raid set.

Following the server network backups, the backed-up files will be backed-up via NTBackup to DLT tape for off-line storage and/or archiving.

I am using Windows NT Backup because the cost of Veritas is more than I want to pay right now.

What do you think of the above plan?

Do you see any problems?

Could you give me some suggestions?

Thanks,
Gary

by j3nn333

I have been deploying NAS servers over the last several months, so I just wanted to note a couple of things that you should watch out for. First, are you using iSCSI? If so, I will definitely have some advice for you. If you can avoid that, outstanding.. Also, you will need to consider the support time that will be involved when you need to patch the NAS with Microsoft security patches. Every server that is attached to the NAS will need to be shut down (sorry to state the obvious) when you reboot. For us this is quite a time consuming process as we have several deployments, with several servers attached.
Also, are you segregating the NAS traffic with dedicated NIC's? And are you on a Gig network? It's very important to have a gig connection if you are planning to serve any volumes to the client servers from the NAS. At the sites where we don't have a gig backbone, we put in dedicated switches and also isolated the traffic on a vlan.
Again, this may not be relevant to you at all, but I would love to save anyone the headaches I've had with the NAS servers.
I wasn't involved in the architecture of the project, just the deployment. I would not have chosen NAS, if I had the opportunity. If you can afford it, a SAN is still by a landslide the best way to go.

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