Sanity Check this FS Build, please [Supermicro chassis, X8SIL-F, Areca 1880LP]

C

cymon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 16, 2009
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Evening [H]ardForum posters,

First, a bit of background. This fileserver (we're going to build two, but they'll be identical) is going to live at a local college radio station. We need something to store archived programs - it works out to about 8TB per year of shows that we record. Also, we need a box to store PSA content as well as audio for playout.

I'd like to run Debian Linux on this server - our current network infrastructure is built around debian and I'd like to keep everything consistent. I did consider ZFS for a while - we would save money over an Areca card, however, the Areca's out-of-band management was the tie-breaker. I'm not going to be around to maintain this setup forever, the Areca has a simple user interface, and most importantly, the alerting configuration is built right in, so it's less likely to get screwed up and we ignore a drive failure.

We do have a budget for this - I can spend several thousand dollars, plus more, next fiscal year.

I'd like to configure a RAID60 - but I have questions about how many drives should be in each RAID 6 group. I'd like for this to scale fairly large - consider that we have like 8TB added per year, plus a couple TB to allocate to the media library. Would using 8 disks per RAID 6 group be okay? Also, when I create the RAID 60 array on the Areca, do I need two RAID 6 groups? Or can I turn 1 RAID6 volume, create another later, and then merge the two 'losslessly'? I've read the ARC1880 manual, and the Areca thread, but this is taking a while to sink in.

I'm going to be using Supermicro enclosures - should I go for the SC836E1-R900 or the SC933E1-R760? Since I'm using a Supermicro X8SIL-F, I could just install Debian on a RAID 1 of flash drives (or SATA Disk-on-Modules) and then put the swap on the raid array, giving me 15 (16) slots to play with for storage.

With that in mind, the parts list:

Chassis: Supermicro SC836E1-R900 -or- SC933E1-R760
Motherboard: Supermicro X8SIL-F
CPU: Intel Core i3-530
RAM: PNY 4GB ECC Registered DDR3

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820178368

I know the X8SIL-F is picky when it comes to RAM, is the PNY okay?

RAID: Areca 1880LP
Hard drives: Hitachi 5K3000 2TB drives

Finally, thanks to the [H]ardForum Data Storage community, ServeTheHome, and SmallNetBuilder - if it wasn't for you guys, I would be totally clueless about this stuff.
 
I'm leaning towards the SC933-R760. Although I'd lose a drive slot, there's more airflow available.

Also, I (of course) forgot to check my units on the 8TB, it's actually only ~1TB per year. Doh.

Rereading, I don't think my questions were very clear.

I haven't seen any posts regarding compatibility issues with the 1880LP, the Supermicro E1 backplane, and the Hitachi drives.

-Will I have any problems with the LSI chip in the SAS expander?
-How many drives should I set up in each RAID6 group? I've seen recommendations for either 6 or 8. I'm leaning towards 6, which should be more reliable, right?
 
If you pick an I3, you'll have to run UDIMM instead of RDIMM (registered). If you want to keep your Registered Ram, you'll have to pick a Xeon Processor (X3430,X3440).
I would buy 2 tb WD green instead of 1 tb drives, and I would use FreeNAS, a FreeBSD distro made for storage... I think it's much easier and it supports ZFS. If not you could always raid your disk. I would do Raid 5 with 4 2Tb disks.
 
alexgal3 said:
I would buy 2 tb WD green instead of 1 tb drives, and I would use FreeNAS, a FreeBSD distro made for storage... I think it's much easier and it supports ZFS. If not you could always raid your disk. I would do Raid 5 with 4 2Tb disks.
Click to expand...
Horrible choices all around. WD should be avoided because of TLER and ZFS well, that speaks for itself.

Airflow is the last thing you'll have to worry about in either of the mentioned Supermicro cases. If you're getting an 1880lp, I would pick up one of the newer E16 models instead of the older E1 models. I would go with the 836 over the 933 as it's a far newer model and the power supplies are much better.
 
Blue Fox said:
Horrible choices all around. WD should be avoided because of TLER and ZFS well, that speaks for itself.

Airflow is the last thing you'll have to worry about in either of the mentioned Supermicro cases. If you're getting an 1880lp, I would pick up one of the newer E16 models instead of the older E1 models. I would go with the 836 over the 933 as it's a far newer model and the power supplies are much better.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip on the E16 expander - the cases are actually a couple hundred cheaper (from better sellers, too!).

In that case, I'll go with the
SC836 E16-R1200B


(geez, that came out enormous).

I'll take the Xeon X4340, then, I don't need CPU power and I want to minimize usage (and thus heat output).
 
How often does the archived data need to be accessed? I imagine not very often at all. You should consider a tape library instead.
 
The archived data needs to be available all the time: we use old shows to cover a DJ who misses their timeslot.

I'd prefer to stay away from really 'enterprise' tech such as a tape library. I'm not going to be around to maintain this thing forever, and I don't want to dump a StorageTek array on some poor college kid. That's also the reason why I don't want to do ZFS on FreeBSD. Right now, all of our servers are on linux. I want to keep things consistent.
 
Be sure you have separate backup media. Don't trust all the data to remain usable. Especially not with 'college kids' likely to muck about with it. Naive attempts to "improve" things often end up destroying data. So a separate offline backup is a MUST.
 
cymon said:
The archived data needs to be available all the time: we use old shows to cover a DJ who misses their timeslot.

I'd prefer to stay away from really 'enterprise' tech such as a tape library. I'm not going to be around to maintain this thing forever, and I don't want to dump a StorageTek array on some poor college kid. That's also the reason why I don't want to do ZFS on FreeBSD. Right now, all of our servers are on linux. I want to keep things consistent.
Click to expand...

It seems you don't really have a need for a RAID. You don't need all of your data on line.

What you need is to have enough data on line to cover the occasional DJ absence.

With 16 slots and 1TB of data production a year, you could keep 16 years of programs on 16 years of backups on line without a RAID. Much more data than you will produce in the lifetime of the equipment.
 
cymon said:
This fileserver (we're going to build two, but they'll be identical)
Click to expand...
#2 will be for backing up #1? That's what I'd do.

cymon said:
I'd like to configure a RAID60
Click to expand...
Just go with RAID6. That's 18TB...

cymon said:
Would using 8 disks per RAID 6 group be okay?
Click to expand...
Yes. It's perfectly fine.

cymon said:
install Debian on a RAID 1 of flash drives (or SATA Disk-on-Modules) and then put the swap on the raid array
Click to expand...
No. Storage drives should only contain the array. Nothing else. Just do a RAID1 of 2.5" drives. You only need to hit the system drive at boot, making its speed nearly irrelevant. Honestly, you don't need swap either. 4GB should be ~3.5GB more memory than it will need. In the old days, Linux could act up when run with no swap. Should be fixed nowadays, but you might as well give it a bit.
 
GeorgeHR said:
It seems you don't really have a need for a RAID. You don't need all of your data on line.

What you need is to have enough data on line to cover the occasional DJ absence.

With 16 slots and 1TB of data production a year, you could keep 16 years of programs on 16 years of backups on line without a RAID. Much more data than you will produce in the lifetime of the equipment.
Click to expand...

Ultimately, this all comes down to a management thing. The system basically needs to be able to run unattended, since I'm not going to be around all the time (this is a nights and weekends effort on my part, I have full-time classes and a 'real' job to attend to).

I'd like to have a single RAID volume since that's just the simplest thing to deal with. I really want to avoid having any kind of tiered storage setup. We'll have two main fileservers, plus a third located off-site. Since multiple file hosts distributed across the campus is going to be our backup strategy, I want those backups to be as reliable as possible. That's why I'm leaning towards RAID60 - I lose some space for data, however, the probability of data loss over a long timespan is lower than a plain RAID6 array.

Since these fileservers will store the backups as well, I'd like for everything to be available all the time. That way, I don't have to train the tech staff and DJ's how to bring a volume on-line.
 
I like the vertical drives - should be easier to group them up.

In that case, looks like we've got the bugs worked out (thanks, everyone!)

I'm going to order:

Case: Supermicro SC936E16-R1200B
Motherboard: Supermicro X8SIL-F
CPU: Intel Xeon X3430
RAM: PNY 4GB ECC Registered DDR3 (qty 2)
HDD: Hitachi 5K3000 2TB
RAID: Areca 1880LP
 
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