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Thread QNap nas
Fri, Sep 13 2019 3:33 PMPermanent Link

David

I got a QNap nas recently which is running in Raid 10 for large amounts of storage.

I was just contemplating has anyone any experience of running DBISam Server on a windows box but putting the databases files on the Nas by using an iSCSI connection from the windows box to the NAS.

I am not talking about running DBISam on the NAS, just the location of the files.

I have an old (ish) Dell server and the disk I/O is rubbish so just wondering if this could be a viable replacement, that would more or less be invisible to the end users.  My company are paranoid about changes,

Cheers
David.
Sat, Sep 14 2019 3:16 AMPermanent Link

Roy Lambert

NLH Associates

Team Elevate Team Elevate

David


In theory I can't see anything wrong with the concept but before I committed to the approach I'd want to run some timings to make sure I was addressing the right bottleneck and not simply replacing one with another.

Roy Lambert
Sat, Sep 14 2019 7:26 AMPermanent Link

David

Yeah I will need to do a fair bit of testing to try and test how a load works.   I did a test run and it seemed to run quite fast to be fair, so it looks possible to do.

What I am not sure about is how a switch going down would be handled if the files can't be reached but the DB Server can still be and other situations like that.  Hopefully not going to happen but have to plan for it at least.

I know some of the larger DB companies provide drivers for NTP (think thats correct) and iSCSI but not sure how DBISam would handle outages etc, don't want to put my self at risk of DB corruption for example.
Sat, Sep 14 2019 12:36 PMPermanent Link

Raul

Team Elevate Team Elevate

On 9/13/2019 3:33 PM, David wrote:
> I got a QNap nas recently which is running in Raid 10 for large amounts of storage.
>
> I was just contemplating has anyone any experience of running DBISam Server on a windows box but putting the databases files on the Nas by using an iSCSI connection from the windows box to the NAS.
>
> I am not talking about running DBISam on the NAS, just the location of the files.
>

Don't have experience with exact combo but we have customers running
similar setup (storage on SAN and using iSCSI LUN as drive in windows).

In our case windows is server edition (various 2012 and 2016)- no
experience running win10.

I think it should work fine but as Roy said do run some tests just to
make sure performance etc meets your needs  (it should as long as you
don't over provision your NAS or it's network link too much).

Raul
Sat, Sep 14 2019 1:28 PMPermanent Link

David

Thanks Raul that sounds good then.  When you say over-provision what do you mean though, do you mean have the disk thrashed by other users up/downloading to much data across the lan at the same time?

As the QNAP has multiple lan ports, I am hoping to (once I have worked it out) to have a decicated GB port from the server directly the the QNAP while all other traffic, including the DBISAM traffic will be on a seprate NIC completely.

Have you ever had any problems with data corruption or issues where the NAS went down but the DB server was still running?

Thanks
David.
Sun, Sep 15 2019 11:21 AMPermanent Link

Raul

Team Elevate Team Elevate

On 9/14/2019 1:28 PM, David wrote:
> Thanks Raul that sounds good then.  When you say over-provision what do you mean though, do you mean have the disk thrashed by other users up/downloading to much data across the lan at the same time?

Basically yes though you need to see if any of this matters - normal
"office stuff" usually is more than fine.

Physical drives have max read/write rate so if you have other users
reading/writing large files there might be times when disk operations
are bit slower. This also depends on whether you have spinnning disks or
SSD's.  More so writes since reads can be served independently using
separate RAID10 copies. Don't know your exact model but most of these
also have a decent cache so that helps a lot.

Same thing for LAN basically - assuming you have gigabit ports those
have max thruput around 115MB/s and if your switch supports it you can
do link aggregation and other things.

> As the QNAP has multiple lan ports, I am hoping to (once I have worked it out) to have a decicated GB port from the server directly the the QNAP while all other traffic, including the DBISAM traffic will be on a seprate NIC completely.

Sounds like a good idea to me.
>
> Have you ever had any problems with data corruption or issues where the NAS went down but the DB server was still running?
>

We are usually running running in environments where in-house IT handles
this and makes sure it does not happen. In general you want to avoid
this at - have orderly shutdown procedures in place where you shut down
servers before NAS.

Make sure everything that is in the path is on UPS power - this includes
the NAS and any network gear and server of course.

Raul
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