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USF-Nealio
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2012
- Messages
- 373
I'm in the process of building home lab with half depth rack-mount components, and I'm in need of an affordable yet scale-able NAS/SAN solution. I've pondered some of the options and I'm leaning heavily toward build my own, but I'm looking for some opinions on my game plan before I move forward.
My current XENSERVER farm consists of a pair of Rackable Systems 2U servers with Dual Quad Core XEONs. Currently, their file systems reside on local storage which make it difficult to migrate VMs around. I also have a 1U PFSense box I'm in the process of building, and I'm also in the process of redesigning my media center. So even though I won't need much room to start, I'll definitely need the room to grow as the future progresses.
So here's my idea:
That way I could initially use the storage within the case to get me up and running (and give me time to recover financially). Down the road I can then purchase a Rackable Systems Omnistor (also half depth) and connect it to the External SAS connection to be used as extra storage for my media collection and future growth.
As far as operating system is concerned, I haven't decided yet and I'm fairly open to ideas. Openfiler is definitely the leading contender, but FreeNAS as well as a number of other free solutions are definitely doable.
I already have a pair of the BCM MX965GME Mini-ITX boards with Intel C2D T7500s. These boards are extremely power efficient (which is a definite bonus) but only support a max of 4GB of ram. They do have a PCI-E x4 slot and dual Intel Gigabit NICs, so I'm thinking it easily has more power/throughput than most of your consumer/prosumer NAS arrays, but I could always re-purpose the board as a low power XENSERVER host if I'd be better off with something more powerful.
Thoughts, ideas, opinions welcome.
My current XENSERVER farm consists of a pair of Rackable Systems 2U servers with Dual Quad Core XEONs. Currently, their file systems reside on local storage which make it difficult to migrate VMs around. I also have a 1U PFSense box I'm in the process of building, and I'm also in the process of redesigning my media center. So even though I won't need much room to start, I'll definitely need the room to grow as the future progresses.
So here's my idea:
- 1U or 2U Mini-ITX case (4 or 5 hot-swappable drives)
- Intel C2D 2.2GHz T7500 (Upgradable to C2Q 2.27GHz Q9100)
- BCM MX965GME Mobo
- PCI-E Raid Card with Internal and External SAS ports.
That way I could initially use the storage within the case to get me up and running (and give me time to recover financially). Down the road I can then purchase a Rackable Systems Omnistor (also half depth) and connect it to the External SAS connection to be used as extra storage for my media collection and future growth.
As far as operating system is concerned, I haven't decided yet and I'm fairly open to ideas. Openfiler is definitely the leading contender, but FreeNAS as well as a number of other free solutions are definitely doable.
I already have a pair of the BCM MX965GME Mini-ITX boards with Intel C2D T7500s. These boards are extremely power efficient (which is a definite bonus) but only support a max of 4GB of ram. They do have a PCI-E x4 slot and dual Intel Gigabit NICs, so I'm thinking it easily has more power/throughput than most of your consumer/prosumer NAS arrays, but I could always re-purpose the board as a low power XENSERVER host if I'd be better off with something more powerful.
Thoughts, ideas, opinions welcome.