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Planning a storage server

S

steakman1971

2[H]4U
Joined
Nov 22, 2005
Messages
2,433
I've been reading over a lot of the posts related to JBOD, media servers, etc. Do to a Drobo that flaked out on me, I saw some used storage servers on Ebay and got very excited. I was advised the ones I'm looking at are power hogs and very noisy.

To get more to the point, I'm looking for some good web resources (or printed for that matter) I can read up on. I'm pretty comfortable with Unix - but will admit that I'm not a sys admin nor do I work in a datacenter. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty - I've worked in this mode for over 30 years and have generally figured out most problems.

What I'm wanting:
-Rack mount system. I already have a rack in my basement. Noise is not a major concern as it will be in a room with a furnace and water heater. No one goes in there under normal circumstances.
-I'd probably run Linux with ZFS. FreeNAS is probably not the best option for what I want to do.
-Lots of drive expansion. At least 12 bays. I'd like the option to expand this. 12 seems like a lot, but my current storage system already has 8 drives in it and I'm 57% full.
-At least 4 cores, but would prefer 8.
-At least 16gb ram. Expansion is a plus.
-Expand into a JBOD case and use it with the server?

The system will have a variety of uses:
-storage server
-development server
-database
-backups

This is going to be used at home in a hobby capacity. It's not production or mission critical.

The system below doesn't sound bad - but I'll admit I don't know what the gotcha's are yet. This one is $300 and I think it has a card to support 8 SATA drives. Not sure what else I would need for what I'm talking about.
http://www.unixsurplus.com/product/...-16gb-ipmi-w-aoc-simlc-sata-raid-12x35-bay-2u

I'm not in a hurry. I'm thinking this might be a summer project. I want to do a lot of research and put together a nice server. I'll have a lot of fun setting it up and will learn a lot along the way.

Thanks for any feedback. I know this is overkill, but I've got the bug :)
 
I would not bother with that and go with a DIY route. That CPU is at least 7 years old. If you're on a budget, look on ebay.
 
Steakman: I think you already have a sound idea what you are chasing. Best was to start, go look through the Server show-off sticky threads and look at the eye-candy.

The SM chassis's are nice but may stretch budgets when you can get cheaper chassis's and hold more drives. The Norco's are coming to mind here.

JBOD expansion is simply done with either a internal HBA and external adapter card (Passive and cheap) or a HBA with an external port or two. These can always be added later.

ZFS, I am a windows man myself and while I don't use ZFS, sounds like you will do fine with it.

I would still suggest keeping options open on hardware RAID, ZFS has great appeal but it's extra RAM and processing requirements start to cost as much as a HW card. Win Server 2012R2 and ReFS with a HW card will do same job as ZFS and its requirements but the Windows will only need smaller CPU and RAM unless you wan't to run some VM's and then you get HyperV.
 
Your system listed seems reasonable.

Whatever you end up doing keep this in mind, never combine zfs with hardware raid. Zfs needs direct disk access. hardware raid plus zfs is a bad match.

The memory requirements are not as bad as some make it out to be.

It really depends on your workload. I have a lightly used system with 48tb of storage and 16gb of ram.

It servers around 5 desktops but the load is light. I would not put this in front of a hundred users, but it does what I need it to do.
 
I currently have 3 other "users" in my house - wife and 2 kids. They stream video, will eventually store files, etc. It's not going to be a huge load.

Windows could be an option - but I'm actually more comfortable with Unix. I was a unix systems programmer for several years and got very comfortable working with it.
I also do a lot with Windows, just not in a server-capacity. Maybe I should branch out some...

I hope to get some more comments. Part of this is for a server, a larger part for me to play with and learn a bit more. I've been doing this stuff for so long, I got bored when I don't have a tech project.
 
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