[Murat Karslioglu]

Here is some more info on our new RDM-USB3 Raid portable storage box.

– Small 6.5” x 5.5” x 3.7” form factor
– High Performance data transfer bandwidth up to 400MB/sec. Able to deliver a steady 250MB/sec R/W sustained data rate.
– 5 x 2.5″ SATA II (The system can be shipped with and without the HDDs)
– Raid 0/1/3/5/10/JBOD with auto-build and hot-spare
– Interface: USB3.0 5G + eSATA 3G
– Supported OS: Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix
– Weight: 3 lbs (without the drives)
– Power Usage: 13W (sleep mode), 31W (in use).
– Easy to configure LCD display.

Our main business is high-end SAN solutions, we developed the solution on a customer’s request in video industry. We are not planning to market it like Lacie.

So please advice if this is something valuable to the MAC users. We can also OEM the product if there is any interest.

Thanks.

Murat Karslioglu | Co-Founder and CTO
RAIDUNDANT LLC
112 W. 9th St. Suite 226
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Tel: 213-489-9041
http://www.raidundant.com

[Murat Karslioglu]

Hi Steve,

If you are still looking for a USB3 Raid solution, we started shipping our Raidundant Mini USB3/esata device with MAC OSX support to the select customers. It’s an affordable extremely light, small, energy efficient 2.5″ 5bay storage box with RAID0/1/5 support.
We’ll have the product online in two weeks. But let me know if you are interested i can email you the specs, pricing and product picture. It’s ready to ship. We get around 250MB/s over USB3.

Murat Karslioglu | Co-Founder and CTO
RAIDUNDANT LLC
112 W. 9th St. Suite 226
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Tel: 213-489-9041
http://www.raidundant.com

[Murat Karslioglu]

Hi Roberto,

The cheapest and fastest improvement you could make would be getting Intel X520-T2 copper 10G cards and keep using the existing setup until the next upgrade.

This is the practical limit for SMB2 on 1G network, you need to switch to 10G network, iSCSI or FC.
Using the same hardware you can get 100MB/s between two linux systems, so in this case SMB is your bottleneck.

Before Windows Vista it was even slower (max 30-50MB/s), thanks to the SMB2. SMB2 improved performance with large file transfers over 50%.

Point to point is completely different story on Windows systems. 10Gb p2p is disappointing on Windows too, you are lucky if you get around 600MB/s on 10G p2p connection over SMB. Of course you would need a fast local storage on your file server, otherwise your limit is the storage right now. If you need to keep copper connection Intel 10G NICs are ok. (If looking for SPF+, Emulex and Myricom are much better)

What is the RAID controller you are using? 600mb seq/read is also kind of slow for 3G controllers and enterprise drive performance. It should be around 800MB/s with 8 drives configured RAID5.

If you are looking for a “fast” storage for a production system such as real-time 4k editing, etc. with a 6G JBOD (16 SAS drives) using 6G LSI or ATTO controllers I get around 2400MB/s seq/read and 1900 seq/write (it is fast).

But if you are looking for a shared storage, you should consider getting a 8G FC SAN or 10 iSCSI SAN device or converting your existing server into one (let me know i you need more info how to do that).

As you may know FC requires expansive cabling and FC HBAs, but it is reliable and you can get around 600-800MB/s from a decent FC SAN solution.

iSCSI is easy, since it does not require special cabling and uses regular network, but with 1G iSCSI you cannot get higher than 90-105MB/s from a single connection either, you may team the ports and double or quadruple it, but it is not suggested.

10G has the same fibre cabling requirement as FC SAN, 10G NICs are easier and cheaper to get.

Let me know if you need more info or detailed specs, test result. It is what i do every day 🙂

Thanks.

Murat Karslioglu | Co-Founder and CTO
RAIDUNDANT LLC
112 W. 9th St. Suite 226
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Tel: 213-489-9041
http://www.raidundant.com

[Murat Karslioglu]

Using ZFS is not the only way of course, but it would be the fastest and best way for you. Microsoft has its own version for storage pooling called DFS. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_File_System_(Microsoft). It seems like it is closer to what you want to do, but to be honest developing a useful storage pooling service or application may take years.

You can use OpenSolaris, Illumos or Linux, they’re all completely open source and have ZFS support.

I personally did, i have over 15 years of hardcore software development and storage experience. Me and three experienced engineers, it took us over 2 years to make it stable (of course with additional enterprise storage features) and another 3 years to bring it to the market (i’m talking about my NeroNAS L Series O/S). And i thought it was fast. Now considering to switch to BTRFS (another 3 months)

Let me know if there is anything i can help with. But it is not an easy project. If you can develop something from scratch let me know i’ll hire you, if can’t i’ll find you a good job (not joking).

Murat Karslioglu | Co-Founder and CTO
RAIDUNDANT LLC
112 W. 9th St. Suite 226
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Tel: 213-489-9041
http://www.raidundant.com

[Murat Karslioglu]

If you need “real” speed i would suggest a 6G SAS JBOD and LSI 9265 with BBU or ATTO R680. I get around 2400MB/s from a single 16bay 6G SAS JBOD.

If looking for a share storage go with a 8Gb FC DAS (from any vendor), but make sure that has a real 6G backplane. There are products on the market that still has the 3G backplanes, they work with 6G drives but performance suffers and you don’t really see 8Gb FC performance.

Murat Karslioglu | Co-Founder and CTO
RAIDUNDANT LLC
112 W. 9th St. Suite 226
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Tel: 213-489-9041
http://www.raidundant.com

[Murat Karslioglu]

Did you check Nexentastor Community Edition? It’s free up to 12TB usage. It is based on ZFS and ZFS supports storage pooling natively. You can share the available space on each host as an iSCSI (of course you need to install a iSCSI Target Software), and on the gateway server using NexentaStor combine all available storage spaces into a single sharable storage. Gateway server can be another desktop or even VM for testing purposes, but for production i would suggest a strong server with at least 32GB of mem.

Murat Karslioglu | Co-Founder and CTO
RAIDUNDANT LLC
112 W. 9th St. Suite 226
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Tel: 213-489-9041
http://www.raidundant.com

[Murat Karslioglu]

Hi Drew,

I’m the CTO of Raidundant. We are an emerging server and storage company and we’re currently developing a proprietary storage solution focusing on video and military applications. I personally like to learn more about the video industry and its specific needs. So i’m not a sales person, please give me a call if you still need advice and i’ll be happy to talk to you about the available storage technologies, performance specs and etc. in details.

Probably Direct Attached 6G SAS (JBOD) would be the fastest video editing storage you can get. I recommend that to video rendering studios, real-time 4K editors or financial institutions.
6G SAS JBODs are fast, you can use dual 6G RAID controllers and get 12G speed, but not sharable unless you share it on the connected host computer and you can not connect a SAS JBOD directly to your laptop. So this option won’t work for you.

Second option would be 8Gb FC SAN, FC is a reliable and also fast, but requires FC HBAs and special cabling that may not work for your setup either.

It seems like Gb iSCSI is your only option, it is not the fastest though, but i’m confident that it will be enough since you work on laptops.

I would definitely suggest something more flexible, expandable and higher performance such as a ZFS based SAN solution for future expansion. Our Felix Z Series is a unified storage solution that supports 4/8Gb FC, 1/10G iSCSI and NAS (CIFS, NFS) with all enterprise features you may need and affordable. Specially block level inline dedup can save a lot of space for you. Our Felix F8 and Felix i1/i10 Series have 42 (126TB) or 60 drives (180TB) in 4U. I would be happy to discuss the options with you. Call our number below and ask me.

I’m on the technical side, so you don’t have to purchase anything from my company. Storage is my expertise, but I like to learn more about video production storage requirements for our future projects and expand my network as well. Thanks.

Murat Karslioglu
muratk@raidundant.com
https://www.raidundant.com
(855) 247-RAID