NAS Backup Solution

[Hightower]

I've been asked to price up a homebrew NAS box to use for backups.

 

It'll need 1gb/1.5gb space (before RAID). It'll also need RAID5.

 

A couple of gig NIC's (can FreeNAS team NIC's?). Other than that I'm not sure. Does anyone know what kind of hardware (suppliers, make, etc) I should be looking at here?

 

I have an idea, just thought I'd ask the guys that might have done something similar already.

[plexer]

Openfiler can team nics.

 

Ben

[FN-GM]

For backups we use Raid 0, although we do have 2 NAS boxes one on site and one off.

 

We use ReadyNas, does what we need it to. Are you comfortable with using Linux?

 

Z

[Hightower]

Our plan is to have one on and one off site. But we want 2 x gig NIC's teamed in each. I'm pretty comfortable with Linux, and there's plenty of help online.

[FN-GM]

Do you need anything other than raid 0 then? they are only backups and not live data. If you loose them due to a hard drive failer, you will have a copy on another NAS box offsite.

 

I recomend FreeNAs not sure if you can team the Nics though, Mattx will probably know.

 

You can simply get a standard Desktop PC with 4 500GB Seagate hard drives on raid 0.

[dhicks]

Does anyone know what kind of hardware (suppliers, make, etc) I should be looking at here?

 

A motherboard with 8 to 10 SATA ports and two ethernet ports on-board (sorry, don't have a part number to hand, but I'm sure there's plenty out there). Might as well get 4GB of RAM, it's cheap these days. Get 6 500GB SATA drives (best price / size ratio) off eBay / Insight / wherever and set them up as two RAID 5 arrays. Might want to get two small SATA drives and maybe a RAID 1 card to boot the machine off (if budget is limited, just get the two small drives, boot off one and have the other as a spare). I like the Antec 900 "gaming" case - lots of room to stuff components in. We got a couple of very similar server machines for a decent price off of SCL Online over the summer.

 

--

David Hicks

[Hightower]

Because we still want some redunancy within each box, for all they are mirrored to another box.

[mattx]

Teaming Nics In freenas - as it's based on FreeBSD there may be a way of doing it......... [ just checking the latest beta i have installed - 0.69b2 Stone burner (revision 3631) and it does have LAGG....

 

Link Aggregation and Failover

 

So you may be in luck...

 

If you are concerned about redundancy then build another FreeNas box and use Rsync to make copies of your data.

 

We have our media running off a FreeNas box I built about a year ago - just under 1TB of data [ two 500gig drives joined using JBOD ]

 

I have that backing up to another FreeNas box using Rsync.

[dhicks]

If you are concerned about redundancy then build another FreeNas box and use Rsync to make copies of your data.

 

Maybe also look at DRBD instead of rsync - replicate Linux block devices (disks) in real time.

 

--

David Hicks

[torledo]

A motherboard with 8 to 10 SATA ports and two ethernet ports on-board (sorry, don't have a part number to hand, but I'm sure there's plenty out there). Might as well get 4GB of RAM, it's cheap these days. Get 6 500GB SATA drives (best price / size ratio) off eBay / Insight / wherever and set them up as two RAID 5 arrays. Might want to get two small SATA drives and maybe a RAID 1 card to boot the machine off (if budget is limited, just get the two small drives, boot off one and have the other as a spare). I like the Antec 900 "gaming" case - lots of room to stuff components in. We got a couple of very similar server machines for a decent price off of SCL Online over the summer.

 

--

David Hicks

 

I'm liking the idea of building a storage server, but once you start looking at rack mount options AND hot-swapp bays it makes you wonder whether it's worth the hassle of going with a whitebox, becuase the costs do add up even with pentium processors and SATA-II drives. I suppose it depends on what level of redundancy and performance you need in a NAS box. I suppose you could do away with raid expansion card if you wanted to just stripe in software or use mobo raid capabilities.

 

Not sure how something like freeNAS or openfiler handles JBOD...can it implement software RAID ? Which filesystem does it use ? Once you start doing everything in software you need to know that the filesystem is up to the task. One thing i like about ZFS is that it has built-in features like snapshotting and it seems to be suited to the concept of using low cost hardware and utilising the power of the cpu and onboard RAM rather than relying on dedicated hardware RAID. Although i think for some features of an opensolaris/ZFS storage servver to work well it still needs a helping hand from hardware RAID. One thing openfiler have done well is package a dedicated NAS operating system....something no-one in the opensolaris community has done despite the projects sprouting up around ZFS.

 

Guess i'm going to have to have a play with openfiler....i've got an old intel SC5200 lying around, but i don't like using those servers for production/live environment.

[mattx]

Not sure how something like freeNAS or openfiler handles JBOD...can it implement software RAID ? Which filesystem does it use ?

 

Handles JBOD without a problem - software and hardware RAID support and as for filesystems - most.

Checkout freenas.org for more info.

[Hightower]

Ok, now I need help. I've decided to go down the route of OpenFiler using rsync (at least to test).

 

I want a box in the server room that takes a backup everynight via a publicly set-up NIC (it can see the servers and network etc). That part is easy. The next step is to have a second NIC that is set-up only to see a second box on it's own little network. I want the second box to sync using rsync from the first, automatically, on a daily basis.

 

First of all, is this possible? Second of all, can anybody give me a hand setting this up how I need it i.e. how to config rsync and how to config the NIC's.

[plexer]

You can configure multiple nics in openfiler to have different ip addresses/subnets and then you create a list of networks and allocate those to the shared areas.

 

Ben

[Hightower]

I've got it sorted now using FreeNAS and rsync. Works a treat.

 

Now it's time to spec the hardware. Can anyone give me the best spec to have for a good price?

 

I'm gonna need to spec the full system including boards, processors, NIC's.

[Butuz]

Just a word of warning IDE/SATA write performance on Raid 5 is dire. If your planning on backing up multiple servers to the nas device at the same time you will find your backup times shoot up compared to backing up just one server at a time.

 

You've got a few choices:

Raid 0 - Maximum capacity and maximum read and write speed. Minimum Reliability.

Raid 5 - Good capacity and maximum read, but poor write speed. Maximum reliability.

Raid 10 - Sacrifice 50% capacity but good read and write times and still good reliability.

 

I am running Raid 5 on mine and the write performance is unaceptible if i back more than two servers up - I am going to change it to Raid 10 over half term. - will lose 500gb of space, but should get rewarded with much faster backups.

 

Butuz

[mattx]

I am running Raid 5 on mine and the write performance is unaceptible

 

Hardware or software Raid ?

[Hightower]

What is the spec of your NAS? What hardware have you used? Is it homebrew?

[Hightower]

Anyone?

[timbo343]

We have a Netgear 4tb nas sat in another part of the bulidling. We backup daily (full backup) to that and we have had no problems at all (touch wood).

[mattx]

What is the spec of your NAS? What hardware have you used? Is it homebrew?

 

Two [ well 4 freenas boxes in use where I am ] - I built the media server with 2 500 gig [ joined to make 1 TB ] drives and it uses its in built 100 meg ethernet connection. The PC is a generic-pc on Mobile AMD Athlon™ XP-M Processor 3000+ running at 1607 MHz.

Its nothing fancy and works fine without a problem - the other one is the same and used to backup.

 

The other two freenas boxes are old RM1700's with two 250 drives in [ software mirroring ] one holds all my ghost images, the other is a dump box and FTP server... [ this has been up for 392 days ]

Check out the crap spec of it, plus its using an oldver version of FreeBSD.....

[Hightower]

Hmmm, I'm looking to build my own. I just want to know what others have used spec wise?

 

Which RAID card?

What kind of motherboard/chip?

How much memory?

What PSU (will it take to power 4 HDD's?)

 

That should do it. If someone has 'been there' and 'done that' can you let me know what hardware you used?

[unixman]

IMO you are much better off buying something like a Netgear ReadyNAS rather than building your own. You can buy a 2TB rack mounted device for < £1000 or a desktop model (13x22x20cm) for £800. Plug them in and they work hassle free out of the box.

 

You'll have a device used by many commercial organisations too. The school I worked at had one, on my recommendation. 20 mins after I'd unpacked it, we had full backups running. Out of the box, you can also use it to host iTunes and video media and there are lots of nice add-ons available.

[Hightower]

Thanks Mattx. That's the kind of info I'm looking for.

 

So we've covered a mobo and processor. How much RAM?

 

The other thing is, I'm looking for RAID 5 setup (hardware). Can anyone point me to a reasonably priced controller that works?

 

And last but not least - Can anyone point me to a case that can take 4 HDD's? (the smaller the better). I've been looking at the ShuttleX boxes but they only take 2.

[Hightower]

(I'm sorry, I keep posting one behind everyone!)

 

I've had a look at the readyNAS and the likes and TBH it doesn't appeal to me. I want something homebrew so that I can easily add on to it i.e. put more HDD space in it etc. I also want to use FreeNAS as the rsync app does exactly what I'm looking for.

[torledo]

Anyone?

 

I quite like the look of the white box supermicro servers...

 

Super Micro Computer, Inc. - Products | SuperServers

 

This is not an endorsment as i have never used their kit, but there seem to be a lot of options for building a storage based on budget and requirements.

 

I personally would stick two cheapish hardware raid controllers in a box, connect 4x250gb SATA disks to each, stipe across each set of 4 disks and then mirror between the controllers. You'd have to do the mirroring in software obvisouly. That way you've got in-box redundancy, and you could go down the cheap route of having non hot-swap disks. In fact you could probably do away with the raid cards and just get a mobo with onboard RAID

that can do RAID 0, connect the 2 sets of disks to dedicated RAID channels and then mirror in the host OS (whether that be windows or freenas).

Edited September 19, 2008 by torledo