unRAID and Nutanix

[dalekphalm]

12 hours ago, AMDKilla said:

If you are concerned about the slow performance of Windows Storage Spaces, I would look into UnRAID.

Uhm... actually unRAID will have worse performance than Windows Storage Spaces.

 

unRAID works differently than normal RAID, because it doesn't stripe the disks (Meaning a file is stored - in entirety - on a single disk).

 

The benefits of unRAID means if you have a drive failure, only the data on that drive is gone. It also means you can pull a disk out and drop that disk into a new system and read whatever data was on that specific disk.

 

The downside is that your read speed will be limited to the performance of a single disk.

 

Storage spaces (and other RAID or RAID-like systems) stripes data across all disks, and therefore allows you to read data from a single file from multiple disks at the same time, allowing faster read times.

 

The downside to a RAID system like Storage Spaces is that if you pull a single HDD out of the array, the data is unintelligible, since no complete files are on the disk (There are portions of a file, times a thousand/million/billion).

[Lady Fitzgerald]

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Uhm... actually unRAID will have worse performance than Windows Storage Spaces.

 

unRAID works differently than normal RAID, because it doesn't stripe the disks (Meaning a file is stored - in entirety - on a single disk).

 

The benefits of unRAID means if you have a drive failure, only the data on that drive is gone. It also means you can pull a disk out and drop that disk into a new system and read whatever data was on that specific disk.

 

The downside is that your read speed will be limited to the performance of a single disk.

 

Storage spaces (and other RAID or RAID-like systems) stripes data across all disks, and therefore allows you to read data from a single file from multiple disks at the same time, allowing faster read times.

 

The downside to a RAID system like Storage Spaces is that if you pull a single HDD out of the array, the data is unintelligible, since no complete files are on the disk (There are portions of a file, times a thousand/million/billion).

UnRAID is slow, which is why it has a provision for caching so it can accept files quickly while the array itself is catching up. This is not a problem for most people because the array can easily catch up overnight. Even though it is popular to use SSDs for caching, often in RAID 0, an HDD that is large enough to handle daily traffic should be plenty.

[dalekphalm]

2 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

UnRAID is slow, which is why it has a provision for caching so it can accept files quickly while the array itself is catching up. This is not a problem for most people because the array can easily catch up overnight. Even though it is popular to use SSDs for caching, often in RAID 0, an HDD that is large enough to handle daily traffic should be plenty.

That's true, but almost every RAID or RAID-like system has a cache solution of some kind or another.

 

The person I was quoted specifically recommended unRAID over Storage Spaces "due to speed" concerns - which is entirely illogical. Storage Spaces also supports Caching and tiered arrays for increased write speeds, while also benefiting from increased read speeds from striped data.

[dalekphalm]

10 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

One difference between enterprise (NAS) and consumer HDDs that hasn't been touched on is TLER (WD's term; other manufacturers have other names. It stands for Time Limited Error Recovery. Without TLER, a RAID may shut down an otherwise ok drive, leaving the array unprotected. Enterprise rated drives will have TLER available and it should be enabled when used in a RAID (some have TLER permanently enabled). When used as a stand-alone drive, TLER should be disabled whenever possible.

 

Usually, one can get away with using drives without TLER in a RAID and vice versa but why take chances. Read here for a better explanation of this.

 

One thing that is nice about unRAID is one can use consumer grade drives without any worries. Another one is that one can use drives of different capacities as long as the parity drive(s) is as large as the largest drive in the array.

Indeed - those are features available in other systems as well, including FlexRAID - which popularized the idea before unRAID became known (perhaps before it was even released, but I cannot find any original release date info).

 

The main benefit of unRAID is wrapping in the "Virtualization" tech with the "NAS" tech together into an easy to use interface.

 

It's not a bad system - certainly. Though I personally think it's a little overrated on these forums.

[Salacious B Crum]

On 12/31/2018 at 4:24 AM, AMDKilla said:

NAS rated HDDs are supposedly better protected against vibration from running lots of HDDs close together. 

If you are concerned about the slow performance of Windows Storage Spaces, I would look into UnRAID.

unRAID is inherently slow not sure your comparison passes the smell test but it offers much more in its add-ons and configurability I currently run a 29TB unRAID array with NAS drives because its on 24/7 if the plan is to have a small NAS that is only on when your using it well then I would say use whatever you have

[leadeater]

14 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

It's not a bad system - certainly. Though I personally think it's a little overrated on these forums.

Nutanix Community Edition would be vastly better, has all the required features and is a proper enterprise ready solution with all the ease of use. Community Edition is completely feature enabled, you don't need to pay to unlock anything but it is not for production use, if the name itself didn't imply that.

 

Also based on KVM, can also do GPU passthrough though I personally have not tested it the way Linus has used unRAID, completely web interface driven and totally intuitive. Other than lack of not knowing it's an option I have no idea why one would pick unRAID over Nutanix when Nutanix can do everything unRAID can do and more, like scale out clustering along with proper data resiliency and striping within the server and across servers.

 

It's a bit like being offered a free Toyota Corolla or a Ferrari 488 and picking the Corolla .

 

Edit:

Just remembered, don't you actually have to pay for unRAID? So it's more like being offered a free Ferrari 488 and instead buying a Corolla

[dalekphalm]

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

Nutanix Community Edition would be vastly better, has all the required features and is a proper enterprise ready solution with all the ease of use. Community Edition is completely feature enabled, you don't need to pay to unlock anything but it is not for production use, if the name itself didn't imply that.

 

Also based on KVM, can also do GPU passthrough though I personally have not tested it the way Linus has used unRAID, completely web interface driven and totally intuitive. Other than lack of not knowing it's an option I have no idea why one would pick unRAID over Nutanix when Nutanix can do everything unRAID can do and more, like scale out clustering along with proper data resiliency and striping within the server and across servers.

I've never heard of this platform before. It's a Linux KVM based Hypervisor/NAS Manager?

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

It's a bit like being offered a free Toyota Corolla or a Ferrari 488 and picking the Corolla .

Maybe a better analogy would be a free 1992 Toyota Tercel vs a brand new 2019 Toyota Corolla?

Since while the Ferrari is faster, it's also much more expensive to operate (fuel consumption and service), which would be more like unRAID (Corolla) vs Enterprise License for vSphere ($$$ Top Tier).

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

Edit:

Just remembered, don't you actually have to pay for unRAID? So it's more like being offered a free Ferrari 488 and instead buying a Corolla

AFAIK you only get a free 30 day trial. Maybe it doesn't lock you out after 30 days (don't know, never used it) but they definitely intend on you buying a license. The "Basic" feature level is $59.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

Maybe a better analogy would be a free 1992 Toyota Tercel vs a brand new 2019 Toyota Corolla?

Sort of not really, Nutanix is the market leader in Hyperconverged infrastructure, no one does it better.

 

 

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

I've never heard of this platform before. It's a Linux KVM based Hypervisor/NAS Manager?

 

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

Since while the Ferrari is faster, it's also much more expensive to operate (fuel consumption and service), which would be more like unRAID (Corolla) vs Enterprise License for vSphere ($$$ Top Tier).

Nutanix when using their hypervisor (Acropolis), Community Edition only allows that, is a complete replacement for vSphere and vCenter. New features also come first to Acropolis then to ESXi and finally to Hyper-V.

 

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

I've never heard of this platform before. It's a Linux KVM based Hypervisor/NAS Manager?

The hypervisor is a fork of KVM with their own customization though that is only a smaller part to Nutanix as the hyperconverged aspects of it can be used across other hypervisors. It's a complete VM hosting platform, Container hosting, File Share and Object storage hosting, hardware and data management, Self Service portal, Orchestrate Runbook (SRM and other functions).

 

Platform is far to big for me to quickly explain or even highlight, better to look in to it.

 

We use it at work and currently host around 500 VMs on it with the other 500-700 migrated to it as hardware gets replaced. I tested a small 3 node all flash cluster to see what kind of performance a single VM could get, over 1500MB/s so yea was impressed by that. Hybrid SSD and HDD work really well too and does active data management and tiering.

[Mikensan]

It kills me that another department where I work just bought an Oracle supercluster and it's not even on the radar lol. More painful when I see companies I've never heard of (Scale computing, Stratoscale). They spent ungodly amounts of money (relative to their number of users) on this system.

 

 

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, Mikensan said:

It kills me that another department where I work just bought an Oracle supercluster and it's not even on the radar lol. More painful when I see companies I've never heard of (Scale computing, Stratoscale). They spent ungodly amounts of money (relative to their number of users) on this system.

 

 

-snip-

I've heard of Scale - when we did our VM Cluster project (migrating from multiple bare metal servers to a VM cluster), they were one of the respondents.

 

Frankly, their software looks fucking awesome - the UI is idiot proof, and it pretty much has all or most of the advanced features of the other platforms.

 

We didn't opt for Scale because they were still not profitable (startup from like 8 years ago) and were "hoping to be" profitable in 2018. We ended up going ESXi/vSphere because it was the gold standard at the time.

 

Nutanix/V-Sphere weren't even under consideration because nobody responded with those as options.