QNAP NAS device

A customer called me a while back.

They have a pretty high-end NAS (2U server with external disk enclosure) that they use for most of their needs: both document and other storage for management types, as well as storage for their EDA cluster. People familiar with EDA tools will know that they are pretty disk intensive. They tend to require shitloads of diskspace, preferably at high performance.

The problem was that extending the storage space of this high-end NAS device is rather expensive. Supported disks only come at 300G units with prices that are higher than the cheap TB disks available today for the desktop market; and while the price and performance of those disks is worth it for the EDA requirements, the number of people storing documents and similar on the same device is not so high that performance would be an issue.

Thus, what they wanted was a cheap solution to augment, rather than replace, their current storage solution, with the focus being on low cost at the possible expense of performance and, since bacula runs well there, reliability.

They were quite surprised when I offered them a solution based around a QNAP device; they had expected a price, without hard disks, of about three to four times the price of the QNAP, and therefore were very happy with this suggestion. Unfortunately, the devices produced by this manufacturer that are supported by Lenny, the current Debian stable release, were EOL'd just before we placed the order; however, their replacements will be supported by Squeeze, the next release, and with a bit of help from Martin Michlmayr, we were able to install Lenny with a somewhat more recent kernel. This drove the price up somewhat, both because the newer devices are a few tens of euros more expensive, and because we agreed to pay Martin to prioritize work on the specific device that we'd need, so that we wouldn't have to wait for him to get around to it.

As of this Thursday, the device, which had finally arrived after some initial delays, has been installed. Unfortunately, one of the disks that they'd bought was DOA; but they had the foresight to buy five, rather than four, disks, so that was not a major problem. In fact, the only real issues that I ran into were this one arm-specific bug, and the fact that the high-end NAS device is still running etch, which means that rsync --acl won't work. That means I'll have to go back there soon to do an upgrade of the high-end device (which had been planned for a while already); for the arm-specific bug, a workaround is already in place.

All in all, a pretty good experience.