Has anyone tried Ubiquiti's ENAS for ProxMox's storage array?

[itsnota2ma]

I recently installed Ubiquiti's ENAS as a replacement for my Equallogic SAN. And the price is unbeatable. Now, is it as robust as my Equallogic SAN?? I do not know, we will find out. With that said, at $4000 for the chassis, I can by a spare and still be WAY ahead of the game. With all of that said, I am not a large Enterprise. I only have about 20 VM's with about 12TB of storage, which is crazy when I could fit the whole thing on one of the new drives I purchased. I didn't do that of course, I am running ZFS2 with a hot spare (9 - 12TB drives).

I am wondering if anyone else has tried it out as well, and I would like to know what they thought of it.

 

[J-Rod]

How are you making the storage HA? Or are you not storing the OS virtual disks on the NAS and it's just for bulk storage?

 

[itsnota2ma]

I am not using currently using storage HA. I have two choice, I can put it under a service contract with Park Place, or buy a second chassis. This unit does not have HA built i. Maybe future versions will. I can also just pay for iCare, but replacement might be faster with Park Place.

 

[J-Rod]

What I mean is that the EQ arrays have dual controllers, active/passive, so there is no data loss if a controller fails or has some fault such as a bad network port and needs to be replaced. Whereas if the Ubiquiti has a fault, you are down until it's replaced and you swap the drives over.

 

[itsnota2ma]

What I mean is that the EQ arrays have dual controllers, active/passive, so there is no data loss if a controller fails or has some fault such as a bad network port and needs to be replaced. Whereas if the Ubiquiti has a fault, you are down until it's replaced and you swap the drives over.

You are correct, the ENAS does not have dual controllers. It does have redundant power supplied and SFP ports. BUT, there is a $48,000 difference between the two. Yes, I was quoted $64,000 for a replacement SAN. Part of that is because Dell EqualLogic no longer exists and they are pushing high end Enterprise equipment, and most of it is because of cost of memory, drives, and tariffs.

So, in the end I can have a spare unit on hand, and/or hope that in the future they have an HA solution. I would not be surprised if we see something in the near future.

BTW, I recognize your handle from Spiceworks

 

[alexskysilk]

Part of that is because Dell EqualLogic no longer exists and they are pushing high end Enterprise equipment,

the BRAND doesnt exist. The product line successors certainly do, and they were ALWAYS expensive in relations to the cost of "raw disk." If your RTO policies allow for a spof in your storage, I'm sure the ubiquiti nas will work. Having said that, ubiquiti has a... reputation... for shoddy manufacturing and poor after sales support. ymmv.

I know that this is closing the barn door after the horses ran out, but Dell, HP, Netapp, and everyone else has entry level dual controller solutions, and can be usually sourced sub 10k for the chassis (drives will cost no matter what you do.)

 

[J-Rod]

For an EQ replacement on a tight budget, I probably would have suggested a used Dell PowerVault ME4 storage array, which supports the same Dell-rebranded hard drives as their PowerEdge servers. It also supports three tiers of storage, but not dedupe or compression. They are readily available on the used/refurb market.

But really the conversation moves to how much down time is acceptable. Or if you have some method of providing HA via software.

Even for small deployments, I've found my stress level is greatly reduced when I have many levels of redundancy to immediately fall back on, because as you know the "users" will be hounding you to get things back up quickly...

 

[itsnota2ma]

For an EQ replacement on a tight budget, I probably would have suggested a used Dell PowerVault ME4 storage array, which supports the same Dell-rebranded hard drives as their PowerEdge servers. It also supports three tiers of storage, but not dedupe or compression. They are readily available on the used/refurb market.

But really the conversation moves to how much down time is acceptable. Or if you have some method of providing HA via software.

Even for small deployments, I've found my stress level is greatly reduced when I have many levels of redundancy to immediately fall back on, because as you know the "users" will be hounding you to get things back up quickly...

J-Rod, there is another option that I am looking into. Apparently I can install another ENAS at another site, and use their Orchestration software to duplicate the storage. I do not know all of the details yet, but this could provide HA until they have device level HA.