Netgear ReadyDATA 5200

[jgreco]

obDisclosure: We're a longtime Netgear Powershift partner.

Anyways, I was toodling around on the Netgear site and happened across this product line. I kind of went "boy that looks Supermicro" and went investigating; it looks like they've taken a Xeon X3400 based X8SI6-F motherboard and one of the Supermicro storage chassis and gone to town to create 2010's hot hardware platform. More, they've ditched the itchy RAIDiator for a Solaris variant that ... supports ZFS!

I guess I just hadn't been paying attention to them for awhile.

Anyways, for anyone who is looking for an "off the shelf" platform that's probably capable of running FreeNAS, there you go. And even if you don't want to run FreeNAS, this is probably going to be a hell of a lot more competent than many of the Atom-based Intel NAS boxes running Linux variants.

However, I'm pretty sure you can do better (and cheaper) if you just go and get the Supermicro bits yourself. I may have an interesting (or possibly sad) report on the outcome of that in the next few weeks. I've got a Supermicro 24-drive CSE-846BE26-R920B on order, along with an X9DR7-TF+. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll be able to get the onboard SAS2208 to work for FreeNAS, otherwise, ESXi I guess. With a little luck, maybe I'll have a solid recommendation for a massive storage server.

 

[bollar]

I'm sure you can do better building yourself, but here are two cautions for using this series of devices:

The ReadyDATA 5200 supports a new, proprietary RAID architecture that is both flexible and very easy to administer. This new architecture is based on the Zettabyte File System (ZFS), allowing you to configure different RAID levels for different volumes on the same platform.

Note: The ReadyDATA 5200 does not recognize non-NETGEAR disks. When you insert a non-NETGEAR disk, Dashboard displays the error message Disk is not signed by NETGEAR. The ReadyDATA 5200 recognizes only disks that you obtain through NETGEAR or a NETGEAR authorized reseller.

 

[bollar]

BTW, it is supposedly an embedded firmware extension of Nexenta.

 

[jgreco]

Well, I'm sure I can do better building it in-house too. Quick Google suggests the base unit is $5800.

So. Let's see.

CSE-846BE26-R920B, $1300

X9DR7-TF+, $720

24 sticks of memory, $2928

Two E5-2420 hexacore CPU's, $798

Look, that's only $5746... $54 left over in BEER MONEY!

Ok they're not really anywhere near equivalent, since the one I suggest here has got 24 drive bays and a slower CPU than their 2.66GHz part, and 384GB of RAM instead of their 16GB of RAM (hahahaha). I suppose you might have good reason to go with a much faster CPU, since some protocols are CPU core intensive, so one hexacore CPU faster than theirs is about $1100 and 192GB of RAM, well that system totals up about $4600 - for a machine with twice as many drive bays and about twice the CPU and about a dozen times the RAM.

But really my point was merely that people have come in and asked about off-the-shelf NAS devices that one could run FreeNAS on. This is almost certainly such a thing. But I agree it makes little sense. Better just to buy a Supermicro prebuilt and go with it. Hopefully this shows why.

 

[bollar]

The thing that concerns me and that I would want to verify is how Netgear implemented the firmware. It may not be possible to load any other OS without some hacking.

Otherwise, I'd be happy to have your build stickied as a known to work server configuration. :) Set-up some sort of Newegg affiliate program with links to the SKUs and you'd have a steady stream of beer money -- at least a bottle a week!

 

[jgreco]

Possible, I concede. However, much more likely to work than the run-of-the-mill not-even-Intel crummyNAS platforms that people keep asking about.

My box is actually going to be a little different, since I'm designing it with the express intention of supporting ESXi. However, it is fun to set up FreeNAS on the bare metal and see what happens. I'm a great bug magnet, the last time I tested a new platform design with FreeNAS we got bug 1531 out of it. Sigh.

I'm waffling on what to do for CPU, because while it's tempting to just get a pair of E5-2690's and be done with it and load 'er up with 384GB, I'm having trouble convincing myself that it's worth $4K to do so, when there's talk of Ivy Bridge E5's with 10 cores coming in Q3. So since it normally takes several months for things to shake themselves out and new devices like the LSI2208 (I think our first here) to prove themselves, maybe we'll just find a cheap E5 or two to stick on for now. Wish the 32GB module prices were even vaguely sane, because it'd be so fun to have a server with 768GB ("my ARC is only half a terabyte!") of RAM.

I seem to recall you had a decent Supermicro setup too. What did you end up, and what gotchas did you run across?

 

[bollar]

I seem to recall you had a decent Supermicro setup too. What did you end up, and what gotchas did you run across?

Yes, I created two systems around the SuperMicro X9DRD, complete details here. I had no problems at all installing with FreeNAS. Everything was recognized and configured correctly, so no complaints there.

Otherwise, though, I had a challenge getting the systems to work under Solaris and OpenIndiana. Basically, the onboard LSI HBA identified itself with an unknown to OI PCI identifier and it wasn't configured correctly to MPT_SAS (problem resolved in some Illumos nightly that hasn't made distribution). I eventually sorted that out and got the system working well under OI as well as OmniOS. If I had planned to go to Solaris in the first place, I probably would have been better off with hardware a year old (and let the dust settle).

 

[James Moses]

The ReadyDATA 5200 will NOT work without buying proprietary-signed diskdrives from Netgear at crazy prices. However, if you remove the proprietary NetGear USB key that contains the NetGEAR operating system and replace it with your own FreeNAS operating system it will work PREFECTLY! Every piece of hardware is correrctly recognized including the 10Gbps cards. With the nice ReadyNAS 5200 chassis (aka SuperMicro) with no disk drives, I populated it with 12 Seagate 3TB drives and it works perfectly.

Highly recommend trying it. I tie-wrapped the Netgear USB stick onto a wiring harness to gather dust over the years.

-Jim

 

[jgreco]

Hardly shocking. Hard to make an honest living selling ZFS storage systems otherwise...

 

[James Moses]

Selling disk drives for 5-10 times their value is NOT an "honest living" Netgear SSD prices are crazy too .. LOL :)

 

[jgreco]

sarcasm fail, sigh :)

 

[gpsguy]

I can hear cyberjock running to lock this thread.

Last entry before today was Jan 5th.

 

[jgreco]

Actually I kinda hope he doesn't, having one thread addressing the ReadyData is my preference... it is not worth multiple threads but it is awesome to have someone confirm what I expected was the case. There was always the chance Netgear had modified the BIOS for signed OS firmware.