Home Lab Storage - Yellow Bricks

Stephen Foskett already gave us a hint during the VMTN podcast. A brand new low cost SAN solution was about to be unveiled today…. After EMC / Iomega released the Storcenter IX2 and the Storcenter Pro IX4 it just released the rack mountable iSCSI/NFS SAN StorCenter Pro Ix4-200r.

The cool thing about the before mentioned SAN solutions is that all of them are on the hardware compatibility list:

Partner Name	Model	Array Type	Supported Releases
EMC	Iomega ix2	NAS	ESX 3.5 U4, ESX 3.5 U3, ESX 3.5 U2, ESX 3.5 U1, ESX 3.5
EMC	Iomega ix4-100	NAS	ESX 3.5 U4, ESX 3.5 U3, ESX 3.5 U2, ESX 3.5 U1, ESX 3.5
EMC	Iomega ix4-200r	iSCSI	ESX 3.5 U4¹ , ESX 3.5 U3¹ , ESX 3.5 U2¹ESX 3.5 U1¹ , ESX 3.5¹
EMC	Iomega ix4-200r	NAS	ESX 3.5 U4¹ , ESX 3.5 U3¹ , ESX 3.5 U2¹ESX 3.5 U1¹ , ESX 3.5¹

How cool is that huh?

Just to give you an idea, you can pick up an IX2 for $ 299(1TB, NFS only), an IX4-100 for about $ 799 (2TB, NFS Only) and the IX4-200r starts at $1,799 (2TB, NFS + iSCSI). I’m thinking of picking one up… Should be more than sufficient to run my home lab on. $ 299 for a device that’s on the HCL, amazing… and word on the street has it that EMC/Iomega is also working on an iSCSI firmware for the IX2/IX4-100… but it’s just a rumor so far.

Check Stephen’s article for more details or Mark Twomey’s article(Storagezilla).

latoga says:

Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 18:30

I would also look into the ReadyNAS line of products. They recently released an updated Home Office version that has more performance and they have a proline with more storage and dual gigE ports. both support iSCSI…thought I doubt they are on the HCL…

I haven’t looked at the Iomega ones yet, but the NetGear ones have lots of other nice features for use at home and can be expanded with 3rd party modules.

(Disclaimer: I have a ReadyNAS NV+ on my desk; still trying to find the time to setup the home lab…)

Jason Boche says:

Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 18:44

Awesome! Totally Awesome!

Stephen Foskett says:

Friday, April 17, 2009 at 01:08

Don’t hold your breath for iSCSI on the existing ix2 or ix4-100… Not saying it won’t happen, but I suspect they would have released it back before the first of the year when it was initially rumored if they ever meant to. On the other hand, the ix2 is getting a little long in the tooth, so maybe it’ll be updated with new hardware and iSCSI?

TimC says:

Friday, April 17, 2009 at 03:10

Meh, I’ll stick with my homebrew opensolaris box. 10x the performance at about half the cost.

While I stick with NFS, both iSCSI and FC are options

virtualgeek says:

Friday, April 17, 2009 at 14:51

Still pushing hard on iSCSI for the other two – the ix4 desktop unit has a different SoC that is the root of the issue and were working with the manufacturer. We’ll see – but Steve’s right – I can’t advocate holding off for it. EMC and VMware folks who are willing to take a bit of risk, ping me, you can find me on the GAL.

ix2 is absolutely getting a little long – and the refresh cycle in this class of products is much shorter than in enterprise arrays.

I’ve used openfiler and opensolaris and they (and others) are all absolutely legitimate options – but there the work to get them on the HCL was important – believe it or not, there’s a suprising number of SMB/retail customers looking at these things formally.