3par with 3830 gateway

[danletkeman]

Hello,

Wondering if anyone has fronted a 3par with a 3830 storeasy gateway? We are looking at this as an option to do SMB/CIFS shares. Our main concern is that it will only support Active Directory and not LDAP directories. This is a deal breaker, as we don't have an Active Directory and don't want to setup one just for this. A lot of the other NAS options out there include support for LDAP client authentication as well as Active Directory authentication. But with the 3830 being a Windows Server 2012 box, I have my doubts.

Any info or ideas would be appreciated.

Dan.

[Patrick]

Looked briefly at it but it's just a DL380p Gen 8 with Storage Server 2012 pre-loaded. If I wanted a Windows file server I would just build a VM and use the SAN for the back-end disk. Depending on your load why not build a Linux/Unix box or use an existing NAS distro? Depending on scale you could either run it as a VM or pickup a cheap box for the NAS gateway.

[danletkeman]

That could be an option. We have about 500-1000 users on the system at any given time. Any recommendations on a linux nas distro? Something that doesn't require too much fiddling would be nice...

Thanks,
Dan.

[Patrick]

Something with an interface, I would lean towards FreeNAS but I haven't used it solely as a NAS gateway device infront of another SAN.