Karlsson goes to Chaos Manor

Sometimes you find a product that just amazes you. If you follow me on facebook you may already know that I am talking about the Synology DJ211j NAS unit. This is a feature-packed 2-disk NAS unit that really rocks, but let me tell you how I got started on this.

I have a bunch of machines here at the Karlsson mansion, and there are three main boxes:

• A laptop workhorse
• A Linux desktop workhorse
• A Windows desktop workhorse

By far, the highest spec of all these is the Windows desktop, as this is used for image processing and managing my papablues website, among other similar things. It is a Windows box as the tools I use for Image procesing happens to be Windows based (I am a long-time user of Paint Shop Pro, …

Any time you can get two for the price of one (a “2Fer”), you’re ahead of the game. By implementing our shared cache as a separate tier, you get (1) improved performance and (2) storage flexibility…a 2Fer.

What do I mean by storage flexibility? It means you can use enterprise storage, cloud storage or PC-based storage. Other shared-disk cluster databases require high-end enterprise storage like a NAS or SAN. This requirement was driven by the need for:

1. High-performance storage
2. Highly available storage
3. Multi-attach, or sharing data from a single volume of LUN across multiple nodes in the cluster.

Quite simply, you won’t see other shared-disk clustering databases using cloud storage or PC-based storage. However, the vast majority of MySQL users rely on PC-based storage, and most are not willing to pay the big bucks for high-end storage.

ScaleDB’s Cache …

There are only two kinds of storage devices - those that have failed, and those that are about to fail. That's the view most datacenters have about the traditionally mechanical devices pejoratively referred to as "spinning rust." All disk drives fail, cheap drives fail faster.

If the average time to fail is five years, you and your laptop can make do with the occasional backup. But when an average enterprise has 100, or 1,000, or increasingly 10,000 or 100,000 individual disk drives, failure is a daily, if not hourly occurrence. Mechanical devices fail.

And with failure comes the potential for losing data - using commodity disks to save your boss $500,000 does her no good if she's fined $50,000,000 for violating data retention regulations. Stock transactions, medical images or feature length movies - take your pick, some data has to be perfect. Not a decimal point or pixel out of place.

That's exactly why, years …

Dear Lazy Web,

In my current list of plans is to try out Zmanda's backup solution. The technology all looks good but I want to try it out for myself.

My problem?

Disk space. I am rather low on it at the moment, and to really test things out I want to backup several databases and see how it really works. My Linux boxes at this point and time are all 1U machines, so adding disks is a bit problematic. I keep reading though about some of the ~$100 NAS devices that have come out. I am thinking that I want to buy one of these and put a disk in it. 500gigs minimal should work.

Any recommendations?

From Engadget I found these:
http://www.engadget.com/tag/nas

I want something that will do NFS. I am assuming that NFS is the easiest protocol for me to deal with. I can put the box on a 1gig ethernet …