I'm looking to upgrade in order to achieve a much more power efficient system and I also want to simplify administration.
My current home file server consists of two big Ubuntu boxes. One is a 5U server-quality dual Xeon box with two Areca RAID cards and 8 SCSI drives + 4 SATA drives. The other box is an older Pentium 4 with two 3ware RAID cards and a bunch of PATA and SATA HDDs. The second box just backs up the main file server. I back up certain directories every 15 minutes, and I do full backups every day. The backups are done with storeBackup which is very space efficient.
My whole house is wired with cat6 cable, all computers have GigE NICs and all my computers have their /home directories NFS mounted on the file server. I want to keep doing it this way. Basically I keep no important data anywhere except the file server.
The system has been working well for a few years. However, I'd like to move to something a lot simpler and more power efficient. But I also want to have an even better data protection scheme.
Like this guy, I find Nexenta with zfs attractive. But unlike that guy, I don't have the expertise to manage a Nexenta system the way he does.
I have also thought about Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with btrfs. That would be more familiar to me, but going with btrfs might be risky...
However, a copy-on-write fs seems like the way to go...
I'd like some advice.
Which OS: Nexenta with zfs or Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with btrfs?
Which hardware?
Considering other options, is there an affordable pre-built appliance that has copy-on-write and good backup software?
My budget is a couple thousand dollars max. (I'm trying to save on my electric bill, but I doubt my current servers are consuming enough electricity to justify spending even a couple thousand dollars. So the upgrade needs to also get me some additional benefits such as automatic versioning of all file changes.)
My current home file server consists of two big Ubuntu boxes. One is a 5U server-quality dual Xeon box with two Areca RAID cards and 8 SCSI drives + 4 SATA drives. The other box is an older Pentium 4 with two 3ware RAID cards and a bunch of PATA and SATA HDDs. The second box just backs up the main file server. I back up certain directories every 15 minutes, and I do full backups every day. The backups are done with storeBackup which is very space efficient.
My whole house is wired with cat6 cable, all computers have GigE NICs and all my computers have their /home directories NFS mounted on the file server. I want to keep doing it this way. Basically I keep no important data anywhere except the file server.
The system has been working well for a few years. However, I'd like to move to something a lot simpler and more power efficient. But I also want to have an even better data protection scheme.
Like this guy, I find Nexenta with zfs attractive. But unlike that guy, I don't have the expertise to manage a Nexenta system the way he does.
I have also thought about Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with btrfs. That would be more familiar to me, but going with btrfs might be risky...
However, a copy-on-write fs seems like the way to go...
I'd like some advice.
Which OS: Nexenta with zfs or Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with btrfs?
Which hardware?
Considering other options, is there an affordable pre-built appliance that has copy-on-write and good backup software?
My budget is a couple thousand dollars max. (I'm trying to save on my electric bill, but I doubt my current servers are consuming enough electricity to justify spending even a couple thousand dollars. So the upgrade needs to also get me some additional benefits such as automatic versioning of all file changes.)