Snap Appliance Server 4500The Snap Appliance Server 4500 is a network attached storage (NAS) device. It comes in a one rack unit (1RU) chassis and is marginally deeper than it's wide. On the back of the unit is a serial port, video port, a pair of PS/2 connectors, a pair of USB ports, and a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports. There was also an Ultra SCSI 160 port that is provided by an internal card.
Inside was a 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with 512MB of RAM and provision for two extra memory modules. To gain access to the hard disks you have to remove the front facia then pull out the drive cradles. There were four drive cradles in total. In these cradles were 250Gb Western Digital drives to give you a combined storage capacity of 1TB.
The Snap Server doesn't take long to install and configure. All we did was use a network cable to connect it up to one of our switches. From there we installed the Snap Server Manager on a Windows 2003 Server machine. The Snap Server Manager basically finds the Snap box on your network and lets you assign an IP address to it. By default it looks for a DHCP server to get an IP address. Then by launching an Internet browser and typing in its IP address, you can configure the NAS. On the down side, the Snap Server doesn't make use of access control lists which means anyone can try and take control of this Snap Server if they happen to crack the password.
Once we had the basics up and running it was time to configure iSCSI. On Snap Servers, an iSCSI Disk is based on an expandable, RAID-protected volume. To client machines it appears as a local SCSI drive. Unlike standard Snap Server volumes, Snap Server iSCSI disks can be formatted by the iSCSI client to accommodate different application requirements.
Using the administration tools, you can create an iSCSI disk on an already existing volume. However the iSCSI disk is formatted, managed, and backed up from a client machine running iSCSI initiator software or hardware.
Currently, the Snap Server supports the Windows initiators which runs on Windows 2000, 2003, and XP and is available for download from Microsoft at no cost. (Support for UNIX/Linux initiators will be available in a future release.)
iSCSI disks are isolated from other resources on the Snap Server, because the file system of an iSCSI disk is different from the Snap Server's native file system, and also because they're managed by the client. We suggest you should either dedicate an entire Snap Server to iSCSI disks, or place the iSCSI disk on a separate volume, which is what we did.
Performing a backup of iSCSI disk should be left to the clients. When attempting to back the iSCSI disk from a server, you may be backing up inconsistent data. This would happen if clients are connected to the iSCSI disk and were modifying the data. The client is the only one that can maintain the consistent state required for data integrity. It is also suggested not to use snapshots on volumes containing an iSCSI disk, as running a snapshot will disconnect clients that are writing to the iSCSI disk and the snapshot could contain inconsistent data.
We downloaded the latest Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator version 1.04a from Microsoft's Web site. After installing the Initiator software we set up the target portal which was basically the IP address of the Snap Server. The default socket was set to 3260. Once we added the target, we were able to view the two available disks we had previously created on the Snap Server. Then by logging in, we initiated an active session between our host machine and target NAS box.
Under My Computer, the NAS box appeared just like any other hard disk. We were then able to transfer files to and from this disk. Microsoft's initiator software would also automatically restore the connection on reboot.
Vendor: Lan1
Phone: 1300 301 053
Web: www.snapappliance.com
Price: AU$8054 for 1TB model
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