Network Storage Converter: did it happen?

[swhiteman]

Hi Guys,

I see http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... smb#p11341 that Anton alluded to a then-future ability to share a host-accessible SMB share over iSCSI.

I am blessed in our new datacenter with cheap, fast, and unlimited storage. However, I am cursed with only being able to access it over a mapped drive (UNC doesn't even work yet -- some problem with their storage OS). (Note I am currently accessing the mapped drive from my services so that is not in itself a problem.)

So has there been movement toward being able to do HA between, say, one local .IMG and another .IMG over SMB? Or, even better, between two .IMGs, both over SMB? Yes, I understand the bad write-through performance you would expect from having SMB overhead on the back end. But is it even possible at all?

[anton (staff)]

Yes and no. Yes, we'll have such a functionality as part of a "Backup Appliance" scenario and no we don't have plans to release this stuff as a stand-alone product. Please grab a V5.9 beta as in V5.8 ability to store volumes on an SMB shares is broken. Thanks!

[swhiteman]

Thanks, Anton. I'll give it a shot with 5.9 and see how bad my timings are.

Chances are the NAS will end up being snapshot storage instead because the perf will be so bad. Sucks because they charge through the roof for local drives but the remote storage is cheap and, for SMB/Samba, actually blazingly fast. Only they make no guarantees that they won't lose the whole thing (it's probably on some giant EMC thing, but if they're not backing it up, ever, obvs. the whole thing could go).

[anton (staff)]

We're good in caching and dedupe so I don't think you're going to break the bank. Who's your cloud storate provider is? I was not aware of anybody providing NFS/SMB access instead of SOAP or something real custom.

Thanks, Anton. I'll give it a shot with 5.9 and see how bad my timings are.

Chances are the NAS will end up being snapshot storage instead because the perf will be so bad. Sucks because they charge through the roof for local drives but the remote storage is cheap and, for SMB/Samba, actually blazingly fast. Only they make no guarantees that they won't lose the whole thing (it's probably on some giant EMC thing, but if they're not backing it up, ever, obvs. the whole thing could go).