Second Opinion for my NAS setup?

[techyphil]

Ok after many hours of reading up on NAS boxes and the limitations with them and the fact that a £600 nas box is still considered a home workgroup grade peice of kit... ive decided to try and make my own.

 

I've been granted around £600's to spend to try a NAS box out for use with deploying software on 30 - 60 workstations at a time, or ghosting images across many machines.

 

I feel that the £600 would be better spent on a custom build using FreeNAS or OpenFiler.

 

Here's the spec's...

 

6 x Seagate ST3500320AS 500GB Hard Drive SATA II 7200rpm *32MB Cache* - OEM

 

1 x Intel E2160 Socket 775 Pentium Dual Core 2x1.8Ghz 800FSB Retail Boxed Processor

 

1 x Gigabyte GA-946GMX-S2 i946GZ Socket 775 onboard VGA 8 channel channel mATX

 

1 x HP Smart Array E200/128 BBWC Controller - Storage controller (RAID) - SATA-150 / SAS - 300 MBps - RAID 0, 5, 10 - PCI Express x4 ( Supports upto 8 SATA's )

 

1 x EV 4U Black RackMount Case - 482mm Deep, 7x 3.5" HDD Slots - No PSU

 

1 x Corsair HX Series 620W Modular PSU - ATX12V v2.2 APFC ( Has lots of SATA Power Connectors )

 

1 x Corsair 1GB Kit (2x512MB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL5(5-5-5-12) Heat Spreader Lifetime Warranty

 

I want to cfg RAID 10 (hardware). Would you change anything about that lot? Ive googled that RAID controller and freenas/openfiler and nothing really comes up about having problems working with it.

 

I know the ram/cpu spec might be more then plenty but its dead cheap this stuff, might as well.

 

Btw, an equivilent system costs £2500 for a rack moutable 1 :/

Edited April 8, 2008 by techyphil

[torledo]

The only thing i would add is a 6 disk hot swap bay or two for you're disks. Not sure you can get a six disk you can definitely get a 5 disk one. IF you can fit two into you're server case you can have one on each internal channel of the SAS controller, you could then if you wanted to stripe across two raid 5 or raid disk groups in software for a 10 or 12 disk RAID 10 or RAID 50. Not sure how you'd set up the hot spare(s)

 

But that's more or less how the xserve raid works.

[techyphil]

Thanks for that advice. Just googled more into the controller http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12460_na/12460_na.html and I think I need these bays anyway don't I? As the card itself doesnt have SATA ports. Just 2 Wide connectors

[dhicks]

I think I need these bays anyway don't I?

 

Couple of these should do the trick (I keep posting links to this company's products - I don't own shares or anything, honest!):

 

3.5" Drive Backplane - 3 x SAS/SATA I/II HDD - Black - ICYDOCK Model: MB-453IPF-B - Central Hardware (Powered by CubeCart)

 

Don't forget to buy cables - nothing worse than having everything all ready to be plugged in and then finding you have nothing to plug it together with...

 

You'll also want a decent case to shove all that in - personally I liked the Antec 900 "gaming" case, with around 5 huge adjustable fans, 9 5.25" slots and blue glowing lights all over the place (will also take 6 harddrives by itself in two removable modules, but I'd say spend the extra and get the hot-swap bays). Makes it look like the person paying for the server is getting value for money, you know? These £10,000 rack servers look so underwealming sometimes.

 

Don't forget you'll need something for the OS to boot off. I'm using USB sticks, I'll let you know how that works...

 

--

David Hicks

[techyphil]

Aahah Hicks!

 

Awesome, looking at those bays, the connectors on the back are standard SATA ports... how do I connect them to the sata controller i've spec'ed up?

[torledo]

phil

 

the E200 should come with a cable that has the standard sas end for conencting to sas hot swap drive bays. So that's ultrawide connection to the board and standard sas connector for the drive bay

 

I don't think yuo'd need to worry about that. If in doubt ask a question on the hp forums or contact hp directly regarding the cable.

Edited April 8, 2008 by torledo

[dhicks]

Awesome, looking at those bays, the connectors on the back are standard SATA ports... how do I connect them to the sata controller i've spec'ed up?

 

The documentation for the bay reckons it supports both SATA and SAS drives - that's what the second row of connectors on the back of the device is for. I can't see any difference between the two, though (I've checked on the one we own, too - you can plug SATA cables in to both sets of ports). Unfortunately, we have no SAS drives so I don't know exactly how one connects up.

 

--

David Hicks

[techyphil]

Ok, ive setup a test environment using VMWare workstation. All appears to be ok.

 

I would like to enable both iSCSI and CIFs / SMB to share out volumes.

 

What network configuration would you recommend, as in my test lab ive got a DC with 2 NIC's. 1 using 192.168.1.0/24 and the other using 192.168.2.0/24

 

1 being for the public network if you like and the other for a direct connection to openfiler.

 

I would like 1 big volume using iSCSI to the server for general filesharing. Then another smaller volume with ftp access for all the network cctv cameras to upload its images to.

 

I wouldnt be able to share out other volumes would I? Well I could they just wouldnt be accessable to clients.

 

I want it so if the DC server goes down, I can still access some volumes. Prehaps you can configure more then 1 network card in openfiler?

 

Thanks for helping a confused n00b

[techyphil]

Aah that array controller won't be compatible anyway apparently...

 

openfiler support say...

 

"With the current 2.2 release I doubt it will. But 2.3 will have an updated kernel which will work"

 

 

Anyone using hardware raid with thier SAN/NAS