| Posted by preciouspigsystems, 01-12-2013, 01:02 AM | | Is anyone using shared storage, i.e. a NAS to provide the shared hosting customers their "unlimited" disk space?
I have only a 1TB hard disk internal to my server but a 4TB RAID 1 NAS I want my customers to use.
Are there performance issues since the server needs to read customer data via the network? Should I be concerned about any performance issues?
Thanks
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| Posted by mike86, 01-12-2013, 07:58 AM | | You need to be sure that the disks are fast enough to provide the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) that your customers require. How many customers are going to be using the 4TB NAS? How many visits do their pages get?
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| Posted by fluidrhino, 01-12-2013, 09:50 AM | | This kind of configuration is definitely doable and a correctly configured NAS optimized for your environment will be able to provide storage for a lot of clients.
The network connection (preferably private network) should be optimized for this purpose, use jumbo frames, etc.
Newer versions of NFS4, which support client side caching, will improve your performance.
If you prefer to use iSCSI to connect to your storage, caching is handled at the file system level on the server that you've mounted the iSCSI device.
For both NFSv4 and iSCSI, more RAM on the client is always good.
Caching can also boost your available IOPS by a huge margin on the NAS side of things. You can use an SSD or even shell out for something from FusionIO if the budget allows it.
A lot of your options are going to depend on what you're actually using for NAS. Are you talking about throwing a few drives in a Linux server, or going for something like FreeNAS or Nexenta? Or are you talking about spending the big bucks on NetApp or Isilon?
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| Posted by zsuatt, 01-12-2013, 10:12 AM | | Hehe, I guess he is probably not spending big bucks since he mentioned a 4TB NAS with RAID 1. (2 disks)
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| Posted by fluidrhino, 01-12-2013, 11:33 AM | | Probably so!
But, he could still be using FreeNAS or NexentaStor community edition!
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| Posted by preciouspigsystems, 01-12-2013, 04:06 PM | | You guys are right, I want to start small and then change out hardware as required. The NAS is a 4-bay Smartstor enclosure. It's got 4x2TB western digital caviar green hard drives. The enclosure says it supports iSCSI but to be honest some of the software is a little buggy so that's why I only trust it to do RAID 1 not 10 and NAS not SAN setup. Did some testing and RAID 1 was the only one that rebuilt properly after a power failure. Eventually I do want to build a proper SAN and put in SSD drives but that's a long way.
At the beginning I was trying to put the 4 drives in the server but the manufacturer has these special brackets which they don't sell separately to support "3rd" party drives so I just went for a couple of small drives in hopes of mounting the NAS for extra storage.
So I'm wondering if there are design guides out there that say, this many customers with this many hits a day requires a system to be able to push this much bandwidth and be able to read and write on the drives at this speed?
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| Posted by zsuatt, 01-12-2013, 04:21 PM | | You should give FreeNAS a try on it with ZFS It won't disappoint as long as you have enough RAM
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| Posted by preciouspigsystems, 01-12-2013, 04:31 PM | | My only extra machine right now can only support 2 drives, I suppose I could use that with FreeNAS. Heard some good things about ZFS as well, that's disk based technology right? i.e. evolution of NFS?
Does Windows Server support ZFS? I might do Windows hosting in future and would be nice to mount the NAS on the Windows Server as well.
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| Posted by zsuatt, 01-12-2013, 04:34 PM | | ZFS is a file system and logical volume manager.
I believe you can use it with Windows Server by exporting some parts of it as iSCSI, or mounting it with smb/cifs (Windows File Sharing). FreeNAS supports both.
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| Posted by suhailc, 01-12-2013, 07:02 PM | | Yeah FreeNAS and ZFS would be the best choice for you.
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