LeftHand Networks NSM 100

LeftHand Networks (LHN) was a Boulder, Colorado based vendor of iSCSI storage appliances. The company has been bought by Hewlett-Packard. I have an NSM100, their first generation product at home. I don't do much iSCSI, though, so let's see if we can make this a little bit more useful for me.

Hardware description

• 1U rackmount chassis
• 4 hot swap 3.5 inch drive carriers in the front
• Dual 200 Watt power supplies (There is a selector switch at the back of the chassis to choose which power supply is feeding power. It appears a power failure is not handled transparently.)
• A small form-factor Wintel system board with onboard Ethernet
• A PCI slot holding a 1000baseT Ethernet card (the cutout on the back of the case is quite non-standard, though)
• Intel Pentium 3 866MHz
• 1Gibyte RAM

Platform limitations

• decade old CPU and motherboard
• Parallel ATA (IDE) hard drives are used.
• Not a lot of RAM inside
• 1 100baseT port for management and a single 1000baseT port for data traffic (some gentle use of a Dremel tool or file should make this better)

good things about this box

• it was free
• Wake on LAN supported on (at least) the management interface
• hot swap hard drives supported (unusual for parallel IDE)

That's a pretty short list, isn't it?

Desired end state

• NFS storage service. With 4 320Gbyte IDE drives in a RAID6 or ZFS + RAIDZ2, approximately 0.5 Tbytes of usable space should be available.
• As many layers of security as feasible:
  • hard drive encryption
  • hard drive encryption keys stored off the device
  • IPSEC security for the IP layer between the NFS server and its clients
  • turn on Kerberos support (krb5i ensures data integrity, krb5p provides data privacy as well)
• No single points of failure for physical drives

bonus points?

• second NIC for storage traffic?
• iSCSI option
• CIFS/SMB option
• faster IO than a USB (2.0) attached hard drive

This is not going to happen. :( Running iperf to itself, it can't manage more than about 675Mbits/sec. Over the wire, on its GigE interface, 390Mbits/sec. *sigh*