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Home Lab NAS/SAN Shoot-Out Part 2

In the second part of my series of testing home lab NAS/SAN solutions I tested Open-E’s DSS v6.

I had been planning on testing the current release candidate of FreeNAS, RC5, unfortunately during initial testing this proved to be a little unreliable in it’s current state as you can’t mount iSCSI targets, even from the command line, NFS shares however do work ok. Until FreeNAS release a version that I am comfortable working with I am stopping testing with FreeNAS at this time.

I have also been testing Open-E’s DSS version 6. This trial product is valid for 60 days, at which point you either need to purchase a license or choose the DSS-Lite edition which is limited to 2TB for free with an option to upgrade your storage capacity via the website.

As an idea of what you’re missing if you choose to use DSS v6 Lite this is the difference between the lite and full products.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Open-E DSS v6 Testing Results

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overall I have been very impressed with DSS v6 and the performance testing results I have show a huge improvement on NFS storage compared to other solutions tested, however iSCSI performance is on par with Openfiler.

DSS v6 has been easy to understand and implement and the functionality\useability of it was very simple and it was only due to  my requirements that I had to use the local console for some tasks rather than using the web interface for everything (deletion of Volume Groups and RAID Arrays for further testing required direct console access).

The added bonus of the ability to install this to a USB drive makes this one of my preferred choices when it comes to Home Lab NAS\SAN solutions, working in conjunction with the VMware 60 Day Trials gives you a fully working NAS\SAN solution that’s timed perfectly to work with your VMware trial software giving you an out of the box solution that’s easy to understand and implement.

In part three of this series I will be discussing solutions using NexentaStor and Openindiana, come back soon.

Simon

3 Comments

  1. Simon,

    it looks like the best solution for a home lab and NAS box… -:) … at least when it comes to NFS.

    After my disappointing Openfiler performance on NFS this will certainly be my choice for tryout and 2Tb of Free storage with good perf is enough for me..

    Cheers

  2. Any testing done using 10gb nic or using NIC teaming/bonding? Would like to see if the 1gb nic /switch ports are becoming a bottleneck here.

    Thanks!

  3. No testing with 10gig or bondingteaming. I will do a further set of testing some time in the future, working through vCloud and vCAC material at the moment however so SANNAS testing taking a break.

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