Ed Morrison wrote:
Hi:
I need advice on implementing a storage server. I really do not have
the $ to spend for a Dell iSCSI storage divice and I am thinking
trunning CentOS 5.x with ftp or FreeNAS. Here is what I am looking at
and concerned about.
Situation:
My current storage needs are approximately 1.5 TB annually. This will
increase to about 3.5 TB annually over the next 5 years (rough est.).
This box will just be a data archive and once it is full it will only
be used very infrequently if not used at all. Files are small up to 10
MB but numerous.
infrastructure to support lots of SATA drives isn't real cheap
regardless. you really don't want to just bolt a bunch of drives up
inside a jumbo desktop tower and call it a server. 5 years at that
run rate is going to be something like 12TB total storage, which using
commodity 500GB SATA drives in raid10 will take around 48 drives.
Thats a lot of SATA channels...
With that many spindles, you'll also want to allocate several hot spares.
I dislike raid5 for a number of reasons, and would recommend sticking
with mirroring, eg raid1 or raid10. You /never/ want to build a raid5
much over about 6-8 disks, or the raid rebuild times get ridiculous and
double drive failures will lose huge amounts of storage.
hey, have you considered the Sun x4500 ? its a 4U(?) dual dualcore
opteron server that comes with 48 x 500GB SATA drives. ***
CentOS:
Upgrading to the newer CentOS flavors. I will not have the ability to
archive this data to tape and I am concerned about loosing the data
when upgrading the OS. How best to handle this?
as others have said, as long as your critical data is on seperate file
systems, there should be no issue here.
Storage limitation. It is my understanding that there is a 2 TB
storage limitation with Linux (and windows) in general particularly
for stability. I see that ReiserFS can go up to 16 TB. Is any one
using this? If so, how has it been for you?
since your data is archival in nature, it really shouldn't be that hard
to manage it as multiple 2 TB chunks on seperate file systems. when
you fill 2TB, take 8 x 500GB more SATA drives, raid10 them, and mount
them as another file system, /u01, /u02, .... keep an index file
somewhere which logs which backups are where.
FreeNAS
Anyone using FreeNAS? What is your experience? How easy is it to add
new drives and keep your data? Upgrading to newer versions?
I setup OpenFiler once, that worked quite nicely, supported NFS, SMB,
and iSCSI, and was pretty easy to use. I'd have to assume FreeNAS is
similar.
*** heresy (for this list), Solaris 10, with its ZFS file system, is
extremely good at handling very large storage configurations like this.
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