Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Albert Widjaja
Albert WidjajaFlag for Australia

asked on

NFS or Samba fileshare to store large number of files from Windows server ?

Hi All,

Can anyone here suggest, which type of LUN or file share is better to store a large number of files (~2-3 million) of recorded voice & scanned documents in iSCSI NAS?

I'm considering between NFS share or Samba since the application server is running Windows, then I will use Robocopy to migrate files into the file share for 5 years archival.

Thanks in advance.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Chris
Chris
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of Albert Widjaja

ASKER

Hi Chris,

I need some storage location so that I can migrate off millions of smallish (1-2 MB each) files to this location, the size at the moment is about 1.7 TB yearly that I need to migrate off from the VM.

What's the better way to do it especially when I'm doing the Robocopy script.

I'm wondering between iSCSI LUN and NFS shared folder.
Really they are going to operate almost identically.

NFS is really nothing more then a sharing protocol. Much the same way and Windows File Shares, only on Linux/Unix. (Windows even has the capability to create NFS shares too, through the installation of a Role.)
User generated image
iSCSI is an IP based networking standard commonly used to attach storage to, and facilitate data transfer.
The protocol allows clients (initiators) to send SCSI commands to storage (targets)

Data is transferred block-level with iSCSI, and file-level with NFS, but really the limiting factor with both will be the speed of the network connections.

So to answer you question, between those two options, there isn't really a better way, assuming the network speed is the same on both. Now if you've segregated your iSCSI traffic on to a different network (say, 10gb or 40gb) network, then create a LUN, and map it to the host.. Data access would be way faster..
Ok so if the LUN is on NFS share I cannot use Robocopy to retain the file permission ?

But it is simpler to create.
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Yes I have QNAP NAS, but somehow I got confused with all of the various type of iSCSI LUN, image based LUN, Storage Pool, RAID group and NFS/CIFS share.

Is there any diagram or picture for that ?
Chris,

So in this case, which one is faster in terms of throughput for transferring large file ?

NFS or iSCSI given the same gigabit ethernet.
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Thanks !