I do not yet have my Drobo B800fs, but will get it today. I’m trying to figure out how to assign it to my network. I have a MacMini as a server running OS X Server which manages several drives and drive shares that are attached to it. Since the Drobo B800fs is connected to the network directly, I’m looking for a way to have the server manage it. So here is my idea…
I setup the Drobo with a share and a user accessible only by my OS X Server on the network. Then, I assign s share with the OS X Server for users and thus drives it manages. That way, the Drobo shares will only be accessible once users log into my OS X server.
Will this work? Is there a better way to have my OS X server manage access to my Drobo? Or is it even possible? Thanks.
If your goal is to have clients connect to your Mac OS X Server and control access to the storage from that single point, the FS and N-series Drobos are not the best choice.
You should get a direct-attach (DAS) unit rather than a network-attach (NAS) unit.
The NAS units are designed to be the server themselves, autonomously.
Since you want your OS X Server to be the server, better to attach the storage directly to the OS X Server machine.
While you could use the B800fs in the manner you describe, your Server->Client throughput will be limited because of the B800fs’s network interface (Gigabit) and the fact that in order to serve a file to a client, your server will need to do two things simultaneously on its network interface - pull the file from the B800fs, and simultaneously push the file to the client.
In this situation both storage throughput and serving throughput are on the same interface.
With DAS, the server pulls from direct-attach, whether that’s USB, SATA, PATA, etc and sends the data over the network interface.
Generally it’s much more efficient to use a separate bus/interface for storage and serving, rather than shoving both of them through the same pipe.
I swear I replied…