Evening all,
(Apologies if this has been covered before. I did have a quick look through the shortlist it gave me, hopefully you won't consider this a waste of your time to read. Thanks.)
I'm in the position where I need to replace our fileserver. We have only one at the moment serving approx 800 users (students and staff) and the HDDs cannot cope, they're hitting 100% disk time for about 15mins between lessons, causing the odd network location not found error, all sorts of things. The current setup is Raid 5 for the data drive, they're something-capacity 7200rpm SATA drives - not the most fileserver-worthy drives imo. After that it's 1x dual core 3.4ghz (ish) xeon and 4Gb of RAM, neither of which get stressed at present.
I was thinking of replacing it with two servers but money dictates that I don't think that will be possible, so, my plan is this:
2u server with 12 3.5" drive bays in the front.
2x E5620 2.4Ghz
8Gb RAM
2x small 15k SAS drives for system (internal).
2x 1Gb NICs teamed together.
Then for the main data drives, two RAID 10 arrangements:
1x 600gb RAID 10 comprising of 4x 300Gb 15k SAS drives - for staff profiles, shares etc.
1x 1.2Tb TAID 10 comprising of 8x 300Gb 15k SAS drives - for students.
Shared data will probably stay on the old fileserver as I think it can probably manage that.
You can probably guess that I'm trying my hardest to avoid the HDD bottlenecks we're currently experiencing. Have I got a good plan here? Will those 15k RAID 10s give enough speed increase over the single RAID 5 we have now. Is splitting the staff and student data onto two RAID arrays going to help? I presume it will as one won't overload the other.
I'm open to any feedback on this one, have I got the right idea? The last thing I want is to buy this and it make no difference, so I'm looking for some confirmation that this is a workable plan really.
Your time (and feedback) is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Shuriken1.