Any Thoughts On Raidzone NAS Products?

amulder asks: "I keep looking at the Raidzone.com Web pages. Their products sound interesting, and the prices are very sharp. They keep running full-page ads in Linux Journal. Currently, they are advertising a terabyte NAS (Network Attached Storage) box for just $22,000 It supports file system snapshots, has redundant root systems, with further snapshotted root filesystems which you can access from the front LCD panel. You can find more details on this device here. I have yet to find a real 3rd party review of their hardware in any of the computer magazines that I read, or technical Web sites that I have visited over the past 6 months. I just typed 'raidzone' into the Slashdot search box and found nothing. Are they reliable? How is their performance compared to other solutions? How does the company treat its customers?"

RaidZone NAS

[RocketScientist]

We have both a RaidZone NAS as well as a Network Appliance F740 and a variety of Compaq FibreChannel cabinets.

We're in a CIFS environment (all Windows clients) and the RaidZone has been having issues trying to keep up with the clients, so we're switching that data back to Compaq gear. We purchased the smaller of the two RaidZone offerings (the single-processor model) and it just couldn't keep up, but we were asking a LOT of it (60 users or so, all doing very intense data access). During the testing phase, however, we could keep the RaidZone at about 7 to 12 MBytes/Sec of througput, but that nearly maxed out the CPU. We installed an Intel dual-port NIC and we're using Cisco Fast EtherChannel to get enough network behind it. RaidZone, the model we have anyway, is a good solution for data that's read-heavy but not write-heavy, or a good solution for a smaller environment of say 10-30 users. Their dual-CPU option might have been better for us. We haven't really needed their tech support folks.

So, the RaidZone is good cheap disk, but it's not nearly as fast or as redundant as our Filer. The Filer can fill up it's dual ports completely and it's sitting at 50% CPU. Very cool. The Filer is a total rock, we throw more stuff at it and it keeps sitting there churning out data. It's faster than you could imagine, and it's extremely extremely extremely stable (Sun Nov 26 17:00:00 CST [statd]: 5:00pm up 169 days, 15:40 0 NFS ops, 2519961566 CIFS ops, 78 HTTP ops) (yes, that's 2.5 billion CIFS operations). The only complaint we have about the Filer is the price: we have two (clustered via Tandem ServerNet) and they were very expensive, but very worth it.

chris.

RAIDZONE NAS

[JimFannario]

We've had a terabyte RAIDZONE NAS (that's 15x80GB drives, dual 800MHz P3's, a gigabit card) in production for the past two months, and we've got no complaints so far. We're using it as the primary file server for our developers (about 30 users, mostly Windows with a few NFS connections, both Linux and Solaris). Performance is fine. We needed lots of storage, and we're happy with it.

Here

[Fett2]

On http://www.linux.ie/pipermail/ilug/2000-October/02 4310.html On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 06:44:14PM +0100, Niall O Broin mentioned: > Have any of you used Raidzone disk arrays, or had any dealings with a > company called Encom ? A friend bought a pair of the Raidzone NAS boxes, and was quite impressed. An excellent alternative to Netapp, if performance isn't the biggest issue.... Kate