Building a New OpenFiler Box - Controller Suggestions??

D

darkoverlord

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Mar 20, 2009
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Hello! - Long Time Listener, First Time Caller.....

Well, sorta a new build.. just need a controller - I found a killer deal on ebay just waiting for it to be delivered now.This will be a NFS mount for my ESX Environment....

What do you guys think about the ARC-1680ix-24 controller? I see that this card can take up to a 4GB upgrade and of course the BBU... This box will replace my current openfiler box that only has 8 Drives in a raid-50 array backed by a 9650SE Controller... So performance is key, I really only need around 3-5 TB of usable space, so I can use up spindles to gain performance iops...

NewEgg has this card with the 4GB upgrade for $1500~ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151053

Or would you guys think multiple controllers would be better?

The New box is a SuperMicro R900B with 24 Drives (750GB) each....
 
no experience of the 1680 personally I'm afraid, but even then I probably wouldn't be able to offer much advice with the info you have given.

Basicaly, what other hardware will be in the server (cpus, RAM etc) and what kind of load will you be running on it (number of VMs, likely disk usage)? If you need very high sequential transfer rates it might be better to use different controllers as you may bottleneck 1, especially with 24 decent drives.

I will assume budget isn't really a constraint as you are already considering possibly the most expensive single card on the market... :)

Most importantly, what kind of expansion options does the server have? Ain't no point in looking at the Areca if the server has a pretty old mobo with only pci-x available. Likewise multiple controllers aren't an option if you only have a single slot free.
 
Thanks for the re:....

I am going to use this mobo..

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon1333/5000P/X7DBN.cfm

with Dual QC 5405 Xeons..

What would you guys suggest running in a Raid-50 (number of disks) for the best performance? I figure I could configure 3 - Raid 50 arrays in this new case ... each array would net me around 4.5TB (8x750gb)

-Currently I have around 40VM's pretty low load... but looking for room to grow... so this is what spured on this project... and money is always an issue. but id rather not be cheap on the most critical component of a storage server :)
 
I would seriously consider going with a Nehalem based xeon as the QPI will probably actually make a tangible difference for you. (Xeon 5500 series)
 
Might want to send a PM to lopoetve about NFS, but If I remember right, FreeNAS has better NFS performance with ESX, and OF does better with iSCSI.
 
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