NAS for Mac environment
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@Ambarishrh said:
I know that they opted for a MAC due to the belief that they get a good product with less maintenance with an apple product.Make sure to point out that they spent so much and now they have to pay extra to get it to work. It is not a great device and the price is really high. And it is a different animal than Windows. They must think differently, in addition to paying more for everything.
If they wanted the best product at the best price, Linux would be the option. Fewest pricy gotchas too.
But the better discussion is the "right tool, for the right job." Never let someone get away talking about quality, this has nothing to do with quality. It has to do with trying to use Mac like it is Windows instead of using it like it is designed to be used. Macs work really well when you follow Apple's suggestions.
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@scottalanmiller said:
A SAN with a Mac Mini file server
I didnt quite understand this part. Do we really need to have a MAC mini for a SAN to optimally work on MAC environment?
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@Ambarishrh said:
Which one do you suggest on Synology model. I am interested in Synology as well
All of the Synology business machines run the same OS and have the same software features. So it just comes down to picking the one with the right selection of drive bays, processing power, form factor and networking for your customer in question.
A good starting point is...
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https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/tutorials/468 talks about using ISCSI for MAC to be used with NAS.
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@Ambarishrh said:
https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/tutorials/468 talks about using ISCSI for MAC to be used with NAS.
No it doesn't. There is no talk of NAS or file servers there. It is only talking about iSCSI which is a SAN protocol. That article does provide info on how to mount a SAN LUN on your Mac but nothing more. There is nothing NAS related in there.
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Accessing our Server 2012 R2 file servers from my macbook Air at work is actually much faster than my Windows 7 machine.
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The article mentions "This article will guide you through the steps of using the iSCSI solution offered by Synology NAS on a Mac-based computer."
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Remember a SAN is not a file sharing technology. You cannot go around mounting a LUN to more than one machine. You have to have clustered file systems and special accommodations and absolute trust in every machine to which you expose the system to multi-mount a SAN and it is never the SAN doing the sharing but the filesystem acting as the gatekeeper.
The number one mistake made in storage is using a SAN (iSCSI, FC) and treating it and thinking of it like a NAS. That is just throwing the data away. It will corrupt, it has no means of keeping the data safe.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Accessing our Server 2012 R2 file servers from my macbook Air at work is actually much faster than my Windows 7 machine.
And which version of MAC OS are you using?
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@Ambarishrh said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Accessing our Server 2012 R2 file servers from my macbook Air at work is actually much faster than my Windows 7 machine.
And which version of MAC OS are you using?
Mavericks and Yosemite.
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@Ambarishrh said:
The article mentions "This article will guide you through the steps of using the iSCSI solution offered by Synology NAS on a Mac-based computer."
NAS is a marketing term here - they assume the reader has no idea what they are talking about. Trust me, this is not a grey area. They call their Synology a NAS as a marketing term. Like a car is a car, but if you fill it with water it is your bath rub. Is it still a car? Sort of. But it is only by being able to drive it that it is still a car.
SAN and NAS are competing ideas, they cannot overlap, there is no grey area.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Accessing our Server 2012 R2 file servers from my macbook Air at work is actually much faster than my Windows 7 machine.
How long is the directory listing?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Remember a SAN is not a file sharing technology. You cannot go around mounting a LUN to more than one machine. You have to have clustered file systems and special accommodations and absolute trust in every machine to which you expose the system to multi-mount a SAN and it is never the SAN doing the sharing but the filesystem acting as the gatekeeper.
The number one mistake made in storage is using a SAN (iSCSI, FC) and treating it and thinking of it like a NAS. That is just throwing the data away. It will corrupt, it has no means of keeping the data safe.
May be this is why you mentioned to use SAN with a mac mini file server. so its only exposed to mac and then the mac shares the volume to the other machines?
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@Ambarishrh said:
May be this is why you mentioned to use SAN with a mac mini file server. so its only exposed to mac and then the mac shares the volume to the other machines?
Correct. SAN can be used as the storage of a NAS / FS. But it is the NAS that does the gatekeeping and sharing, not the SAN. This guide from Synology is perfect for setting up the connection from the Synology to the Mac Mini. Then you share that storage from the Mac Mini via SMB.
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Got it. Let me get the pricing tomorrow from vendors on Synology, and see how this goes. But this post was worth, got couple of things cleared and learned something new. Thank you @scottalanmiller
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If you have the overflowing pockets, a good thing to do is to buy these three devices:
- Drobo B800i
- Drobo B800fs or 5n
- Netgear SC101
The B800i and the SC101 are pure SANs. No hint of NAS functionality whatsoever. The B800fs is a pure NAS, no SAN functionality whatsoever. Playing with these devices is great because the two Drobos help to teach what a Synology or a ReadyNAS would be like if it was torn apart into two different units - because it is difficult to understand what is NAS and what is SAN when nearly every devices mashes them together into a single box all of the time. Forcing you to see them discretely is very educational.
The SC101 is really hand for understanding just how little a SAN can be and how little the name means. The SC101 has no RAID, no controller even, is $99 and completely useless - yet it is a complete SAN by any definition. It is the disk array for a block storage network. Seeing SAN stripped to the core is very informative in helping to dissolve misassociations that are so often made with SAN.
Technically any USB external hard drive is a SAN too, but this is a little too much unknown networking for most people to get the same value out of seeing one as they do out of an SC101 since it uses TCP/IP networking.
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And being majority of MAC machines, i think it makes more sense to have a MAC mini server, where logins can be centralised, for file sharing and time machine backup for some key mgmnt users. The OSX server also mentions about XSAN http://www.apple.com/ae/osx/server/features/#xsan
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@Ambarishrh said:
And being majority of MAC machines, i think it makes more sense to have a MAC mini server, where logins can be centralised, for file sharing and time machine backup for some key mgmnt users. The OSX server also mentions about XSAN http://www.apple.com/ae/osx/server/features/#xsan
Yes, using a SAN means that there are no logins at all. The entire concept of a login doesn't exist on a SAN
A SAN is just a disk drive that is "far away", nothing more. You don't log into disk drives, you just read them.Any NAS will centralize accounts too. That you use a Mac won't add that functionality, but might make it easier to manage.
You can do Timemachine just as easily with other devices too. That's not Apple specific.
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@Ambarishrh said:
The OSX server also mentions about XSAN http://www.apple.com/ae/osx/server/features/#xsan
XSAN is a competitor with SAN-MP. It's a clustered file system that Apple provides. It is very, very unlikely that you want anything to do with this. Especially as it requires fibre channel to the desktop!!
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I basically just wrote the Wikipedia entry without having looked. Here is the Wikipedia wording of what I just said: "Xsan is Apple Inc.'s storage area network (SAN) or clustered file system for Mac OS X. Xsan enables multiple Mac desktop and Xserve systems to access shared block storage over a Fibre Channel network."
