NAS comparison: iomega and netgear
As you will know, I’ve had no end of problems with iomega NAS boxes (and customer support for that matter), and so with a recent purchase decided to test the market again and purchase a different product.
Back in the day we had some Netgear ReadyNas boxes, little desktop units offering 2-3TB of network storage which was ideal for backups. The ReadyNas boxes weren’t special in any way, the interface was decidedly average and the software had a few quirks, but they did have one brilliant feature – they hardly ever stopped working.
So, I decided to give them a go again and have since done a direct comparison between the previously-complained-about iomega units and the newly-purchased netgear ones. There are a couple of differences you should know before you worry about the performance though: 1) the netgears are considerably more expensive; 2) the netgears come with a much better warranty. Continue Reading →
Quick: Why not to buy the iomega ix12-300r either!
In a previous blog post I explained that our iomega ix4-200r was a generally faulty product with little or no hope of ever making it into my good books, mainly because of the (deliberate) limitations on iSCSI LUN sizes.
After feeding this information back to the suppliers who recommended the product they gave a response which was something like “oh, yes, well, those are the small units, they’re not too good, try the larger unit instead: the ix12″.
And so we did, we bought a few ix12-300r units and configured them up appropriately, the good news is they don’t have a restriction on iSCSI LUNs that I’m bothered about – it might be set at 16TB but I’m okay with that. The bad news is, the product itself is just as unreliable and realistically can’t be used for anything sensible. We had a fault initially logged on the 13th October and as I write this on the 5th December it’s still not resolved fully. Continue Reading →
Quick: Why not to buy the iomega ix4-200r for veeam backups
In previous blog posts (Using veeam to backup the new virtual infrastructure to Iomega NAS boxes and Backup Strategies with Virtual Machines in VMware using Veeam) I mention my purchases of the iomega ix4-200r, generally I haven’t been impressed with them because they’ve been a little unreliable.
Looking at use around the net I decided that the best way to have a target for my veeam backups would be the iSCSI initiator from Windows straight onto the device, so I should provision a LUN, add it to Windows and write to it.
I tried and failed, after about a week of to’ing and fro’ing with veeam, vmware and iomega support I got to the bottom of the issue: these nas boxes are software locked to provide LUNs that are <= 2TB in size* – bearing in mind my 8 file servers each serve up anywhere between 500GB and 1TB worth of data this means that my first backup file from veeam is always going be over 2TB, making the device pretty much worthless in my environment.
*I’ve been assured that a LUN that’s exactly 2TB will work, although I can’t actually get that working in my test lab having tried it on two separate devices.