> Lord Drachenblut wrote:
>> You might try looking into using freenas. it can do alot of the things you
>> are looking for and has support for zfs and iscsi at this point.
>
> Thanks for the idea!
>
> I've looked at FreeNAS in the past, and it is an interesting option and
> seemingly useful to me since I use FreeBSD a lot, but what about the
> hardware end of things? What would host the disks that FreeNAS would
> manage and make available?
Well, that really depends on what your standards are/how much you're
willing to pay.
We serve several hundred people at a time, all of their workstation
files (Windows's Desktop, My Documents, ApplicationData and such
folders) accessed directly from one Samba file server. We're feeling a
pretty hard crunch—painful amounts of wait states, file operations
taking too long or failing—so we decided to upgrade.
I went to Dell and spec'ed out a brand new external RAID enclosure
that connects via some PCI-e RAID controller card, with 10 15k RPM SAS
drives in (the fastest drives available for the array) providing 2TB
of reasonably redundant (RAID 10 + a couple of hotswaps sitting on
standby) storage. I'm also hoping for a little bit of a boost during
read operations, theoretically, from the RAID config.
Oh, and we had to buy a brand new server so we could connect the
enclosure to something. I just picked the cheapest rack-mount Dell had
that would connect to that enclosure, and tweaked the config slightly.
Because we caught them at the end of their sales quota time period,
and because we bought two identical setups, we were able to get them
for about $3,500 a piece.
Then, when one of the two (redundant, hotswappable) power supplies was
DOA and I called to get a new one, they seriously insisted on knowing
what O/S I was planning on installing (Ubuntu Linux), "Oh, well, we
can never know what strange problems can happen with that; I really
must suggest you use Red Hat Linux." *ahem* "The 'my power supply is
dead' indicator light is flashing, and the RAID enclosure is not even
connected to the server, which has a blank hard disk. Are you
seriously suggesting this is a software compatibility issue?"
Tune in after we get things setup for how well it works as a solution
to our crunch...
Simón
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