Looking for a new storage solution

I currently have an ESXi whitebox, on which runs an OpenIndiana 151 VM, with passed through RAID card, running a simple ZFS storage pool. I'm looking to build/buy a separate and dedicated NAS. It will be used for the following things:

• ESXi Datastore (iSCSI?)
• General Data Storage (SFTP Server as well)
• NFS Share (Music/HD Video Streams), AFP Share (Time Machine Backups)

My goal is to be able to saturate Gbit, or come damn close. Ideally, I'd like to have a pair of teamed NICs, and get >Gbit transfer rates, but that'd be a bonus, not a requirement.

For the time being, I'll just transfer my disks (2x Samsung F4's mirrored) over to the new machine until I can afford to buy new ones. I can't see myself going any larger than 4TB - 6TB usable when I do upgrade. I'm just looking to build the server itself for the time being.

While we're on the topic, I'm also curious if there's anything other than ZFS people recommend I look in to. I'm looking for a free solution, and there are no Windows machines in the house, so that should be taken into consideration. I'm comfortable with *nix and the command line as well if need be.

I'm not really 100% sure which route to go here, and I've kind of narrowed it down to three possible solutions, although there's a good possibility somebody will have something else to recommend.

Anyways, my proposed solutions are roughly as follows:

Qnap/Synology NAS
I see these recommended a lot here on the boards. I'm not sure how suitable of a solution these would be for my application, but it seemed worth considering. For the price, my instinct tells me to build something myself, but I'm curious to see what other people think.

The units I was looking at in particular were the Qnap TS-412 or Synology DS411slim. I was also looking at the QNAP TS-419P+ and Synology DS413j, but these are a bit closer to the higher end of my budget.

Build a Server (Desktop Grade)
This would basically just involve throwing an Ivy Bridge Pentium or i3 in whatever motherboard with 8GB or 16GB of RAM, then grabbing an Intel dual port NIC off Ebay or something. This doesn't seem like an excellent solution to me.

Build a Server(Server Grade)
For this I was looking at a setup similar to the following:

Intel Pentium G2020
SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL+-F
Kingston 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered

This seemed like a fairly elegant setup for a reasonable amount of money. I'm aware that the G2020 wouldn't allow me to utilize ECC, but I figured this left me with an option to drop in a Xeon as money permitted with minimal investment up front.


So that's where I'm sitting currently, just looking for some input from people who know what they're doing a bit better than myself.

Thanks,


- Jesse

One thing you haven't mentioned is a HP Microserver - four drive bays sounds like it will suffice, it uses little power, can run ZFS (well, I use ZFS on Ubuntu so look into that if that's not your thing) and is relatively inexpensive. Worth considering IMHO.

Oh, and it has ECC RAM and a PCI-E slot for more NIC ports (or just better ones than the onboard, e.g. Intel).

Jim G said:

One thing you haven't mentioned is a HP Microserver - four drive bays sounds like it will suffice, it uses little power, can run ZFS (well, I use ZFS on Ubuntu so look into that if that's not your thing) and is relatively inexpensive. Worth considering IMHO.

Oh, and it has ECC RAM and a PCI-E slot for more NIC ports (or just better ones than the onboard, e.g. Intel).

Click to expand...

Ahh yes, it does seem I have overlooked this option. With the ability to expand RAM and add my own NIC, this might not be a half bad choice. Thank you for bringing this up, I'll have to do a bit more research on it.

Upon further investigation, the HP Microserver isn't looking like as good of a deal as it first appeared to be. I very well may be missing something fundamental, so please let me now if this is the case.

From what I've found, I need to buy (1) HP ProLiant N40L and (2) Kingston KTH-PL313E/4G. Where I've been looking, this comes to $487.97 before taxes and shipping. This also doesn't include a dual intel NIC ($35) or the SSD I was planning on installing OI on and using as a cache.

Considering my SuperMicro/G2020/8GB ECC solution is closer to $420 with a case and PSU, for the essentially same thing (not including SSD), I'm definitely leaning in this direction at the time being.

Anyways, just spilling my thoughts out Looking forward to getting more feedback.

EDIT: Now that I've posted prices it should be noted I'm in Canada.

It doesn't really take that much for basic file serving. Your throughput will be limited by your disks the most, but most modern drives will saturate a gigabit link anyway. The rig in my sig is way overkill, but with just 3x2tb samsungs in raidz I regularly see >100MB/s transferring movies.

Desktop vs server board really doesn't matter much for home use as long as whatever you pick has the features you want. Personally I would recommend the Supermicro + i3 just for the ECC support. Plus you get dual Intel nics so you save $ on buying a card and an expansion slot.
A SSD for the boot drive isn't really necessary. It isn't going to get you any more performance anyway.

As far as alternatives to ZFS, Linux software raid, hardware raid, flexraid, unraid, etc. I haven't used any of these so I can't really chime in. Personally, I wouldn't move from ZFS to any of these though.

PointandClick said:

Desktop vs server board really doesn't matter much for home use as long as whatever you pick has the features you want. Personally I would recommend the Supermicro + i3 just for the ECC support. Plus you get dual Intel nics so you save $ on buying a card and an expansion slot.

Click to expand...

The main reason I was leaning towards the SuperMicro board over a desktop grade one is just the two integrated Intel NICs. As you said, it saves me from buying a card.

Do the i3's support ECC? I was under the impression only the Xeons did. If this is the case I'd gladly spend the extra few dollars.

PointandClick said:

A SSD for the boot drive isn't really necessary. It isn't going to get you any more performance anyway.

Click to expand...

I understand this, I was just planning on having an SSD as a cache drive anyways, so I figured I'd just install OI on a small partition and use the rest for cache. Saves me need another boot drive.

Thanks for your input.

Jesse B said:

Do the i3's support ECC? I was under the impression only the Xeons did. If this is the case I'd gladly spend the extra few dollars.



I understand this, I was just planning on having an SSD as a cache drive anyways, so I figured I'd just install OI on a small partition and use the rest for cache. Saves me need another boot drive.

Thanks for your input.

Click to expand...

My understanding is that they do. You might check out this thread.

Gotcha on the drive. I've heard of people trying ZIL/L2ARC on boot drive, but have never heard any conclusive accounts of how (well) it works.

Hmm upon further investigation, Intel says the G2020 supports ECC as well. I'll do some more digging on both the G2020 and the i3-3220 and see what I can turn up.

As for the ZIL/L2ARC on the same drive, gonna have to do some more research on that as well. Just seemed like a convenient solution, seen it mentioned in people's setups quite a few times.

I agree that the HP MicroServer N40l is a great box. I run mine for a couple of months now with 8GB ECC RAM, a 2nd NIC (Intel on PCIe x16 slot) + the iLO/IPMI card for remote control. I've put in 6 drives - 4 on the bays + one in a 5.25" to 3.5" frame and on top of that a small 2.5" HD for the system, which is connected to the eSATA port with an eSATA to SATA cable which runs from outside into the case.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with ZFS on Linux on it for some weeks and it's awesome! The snapshots will be done by the zfs-auto-snapshot package and I've writte a pretty small scrub shellscript that runs every 3rd night over the RAIDz1 of 5x 1.5TB HDs. Couldn't be happier with it