I have built quite a few large ZFS fileservers with DAS over the years, and they all look about the same - the computer itself is a 4U, 36-drive chassis, and then we attach 2 or 3 or 4 of the 4U, 45-drive supermicro JBOD chassis to them.
So, a bunch of big 4U devices, and the first one of them has a bunch of storage (36 disks) in it. All is well.
But now we're going to build some more, and I am thinking about NOT having any disks in the main system - that is, just get a 1U or 2U "head unit" that has no spinning disks in it - just a small system for the motherboard and boot SSDs and cache SSDs and put ALL of the storage in the attached JBODs.
The nice thing about this setup is that I have nice, hotswap 2.5" trays on the front of the system for lots of SSDs - a boot mirror and maybe 4 or 6 SSDs for SLOG, etc. Also I get a built-in CD rom for system load and updates, which is really handy. When we used the 36 drive 4U chassis, we have zero slots for SSDs and they have to be inside the chassis and not hot swap, and also we have a lame USB cd rom in the rack.
Is this how folks do it ? Any downsides to this ?
The only downside I can think of is that we are "spending" 2U of rack space and "spending" some wattage on non-storage equipment, but it's not that much ...
Any reason not to do this ?
Thanks.
So, a bunch of big 4U devices, and the first one of them has a bunch of storage (36 disks) in it. All is well.
But now we're going to build some more, and I am thinking about NOT having any disks in the main system - that is, just get a 1U or 2U "head unit" that has no spinning disks in it - just a small system for the motherboard and boot SSDs and cache SSDs and put ALL of the storage in the attached JBODs.
The nice thing about this setup is that I have nice, hotswap 2.5" trays on the front of the system for lots of SSDs - a boot mirror and maybe 4 or 6 SSDs for SLOG, etc. Also I get a built-in CD rom for system load and updates, which is really handy. When we used the 36 drive 4U chassis, we have zero slots for SSDs and they have to be inside the chassis and not hot swap, and also we have a lame USB cd rom in the rack.
Is this how folks do it ? Any downsides to this ?
The only downside I can think of is that we are "spending" 2U of rack space and "spending" some wattage on non-storage equipment, but it's not that much ...
Any reason not to do this ?
Thanks.