Amahi and drobo

[comfysofa]

Hi - ive just created my login, but purely from curiosity - i was crusing through an engadget thread about the drobo (ive just ordered a pro, hasnt turned up yet though) and saw a link here. Ive been searching for a decent home server setup (currently using windows 7 beta) and just sharing out folders to the network. Now - here (for me) is the problem. The reason ive gone for the drobo is protection, you can loose 2 drives and still keep your data. I currently run a raid 5 array across 7 drives using the onboard intel controller on my machine. Its not reliable though - twice, ive lost over 4tb's worth of data when a drive has gone - ive replaced it and it either a. still failed or b. another drive has gone - anyway, in a real world drive failiure scenario its failed on a number of occassions. Now, im not complaining, but what would be nice if i could run amahi on a standalone pc with a couple of drives mirrored but keep the content on the drobo - can this be done??? - otherwise it looks a great bit of software....

[bsk]

Was the drive failure while using Amahi?

Also im not sure about your second question, you want to run Amahi and drobo at the same time?

[comfysofa]

No it wasnt - the point im making is at the end of the day your os is only as good as the hardware its sitting on, and data is more important than the os whatever it is. The drobo seems like the most reliable, scalable and easy to use disk array that ive seen and from what i can see here amahi looks to be a good contender for the media server crown. I want to be able to run the 2 together. Case in point.....im a sys admin for the company i work for (theres about 15 of us). Personally ive never come across anything worse from a raid storage point of view than compaq equipment. its so bad we have a 9bay disk shelf that holds the door open in the server room everytime we want to move kit in. Everytime it breaks compaq support are clueless most conversations start off with "well, that shouldnt have happened".....other extreme, we also have a network appliance. Never fails, never lost data, absolutely the best bit of hardware we've ever bought, scalable, upgradable and its saved our arses i dont know how many times. If goes on the net app - it never comes off. So, as a result we tend to run dell poweredges for servers and netapps for storage - we trust both but for what they're both good at - i want to kind of replicate the same scenario at home....

[marcel]

I understand your looking for separate san/nas. I like the idea off seperate storage device. There is a distribution Openfiler. I dont know off this working together with Amahi/Fedora. I'am not a admin but Openfiler supports iSCSI. Can this be done?

[cpg]

I love the drobo. i truly wish we could run amahi on it!

the seamless way of handling raid is really nice.

if the drobo can be mounted from linux, then yes, it can be used with amahi.

we don't have it well documented, but this should help.

http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/SharingToLinux

perhaps you can take a minute to document it?

[comfysofa]

well, i just got the drobo pro the other day....spent the last few days loading it up. First impressions - beautifully well built - packaged almost like apple equipment (high quality packaging) makes you feel like youve bought a nice bit of kit. things i didnt expect: i knew it was i scsi but i did think you could have multiple connections to it which you cant. although wierdly enough ive managed to keep to open iscsi connections to it but on of the machines cant connect to the drobomanager - the other can but they both see the mounted drive letter - strange. Apparently there is a linux aftermarket droboapp that can be used but its in beta at the moment - theres someone called "BSDGirl" who from what i can see is way clever'er than i could ever be - she (i presume she is a she) seems to be developing linux stuff for a standard drobo but i can presume that the series 2 is the same as the pro.....thats about as far as ive got....ill let you know as i learn more...

[comfysofa]

Well, its a little while since ive posted back. Had the DroboPro for a few months now.....id say its generally not good.....ill try to summarize...

1. Thought i could have multiple iscsi connections open (im sure our netapp at work does...) but you can't so it must be front ended with a server of some sort.
2. To get the dashboard on (in windows) you have to faff about with connecting the usb cable and then disconnecting and then shutting it down, etc etc...hassle.
3. Going by its own bumph of " you can chop drives in and out..." etc etc, i did over the space of 8 weeks to get some bigger drives in there....that was too much for it and one day, nothing...all my stuff, gone.
4. Today, ironically after rebuilding my windows server and then reinstalling the dashboard, its now decided to randomly shut itself down in the middle of transferring stuff which has kicked off the alarm bells (re last filesystem loss) so im now furiously backing stuff up allowing for the inevitable....
5. After all of the above i simply dont trust it but ive got no choice....


On the plus side if there is one - when it is working transferring data from the server to the drobo over iscsi is lightning - it can burst on my gigabit switch at 230mb and steady out on big transfers at about 80 - 100 meg. Quite incredible.....

Anyway - reason i logged back on - just got a spare pc to try amahi.....so, does the drobo work on it...?

[lou1z]

not sure about the drobo but i can tell you openfiler is a superb piece of software that will work with it.
used on a raid10 and it will connect to anything. i've not had much chance to play with amahi as i'd like but i would imagine that you just mount a share as usual.