Best approach to EMC replacement

[lraymond]

Hey all, my 1st post so here is my welcome message (will do the real one later) :)

So, I have an old EMC that's activing up, and just a drive replacement is hundreds since they use special drives with firmware, etc. I want to remove that device and replace with 2 servers for fault tolerance. The current use is for our processing servers to write images, etc. to the EMC, then the webservers have it mounted and images for the websites are read from. Nothing to crazy.

I looked at some 1U servers, 4 disk bay's, and just for speed was going to get a raid controller as well. I am watching the into video right now and just noticed 1 drive get's used for the OS, so are people using SD cards to boot from, or USBs, etc not to mention I would like either a fast fix or redundancy on the OS. I want to probably get (4) 2T 10K drives in a raid10 which should prove fast enough, but the next question is the export. The current EMC is connected via fibre and then NFS exported.

So, since this is the n00b forum, I am wondering on;

1. Server. Does FreeNas have issues or anything with any specific hardware? I was looking at a 1U ASUS, duel PS, Intel E3 2G CPU and probably 8G RAM.

2. Raid - LSI is pretty standard I think, any issues with them?

3. Setup. If I currently have 4T of storage, and using 2T, I was thinking (4) 2T drives in a raid 10. Is that the right approach?

4. iSCSI. Still reading on this, but not sure if I should (or can) go this route, so have to read along with a reply from here.

I would like to move on this sooner than later, so not sure if there is a hardware spot you can goto quicker and see what others have bought, as opposed to newegg building, as I want to make sure all hardware is supported. I looked at a full buffalo solution, but they only have 5400rpm drives, and well overpriced!

I appreciate all read/replies.

 

[jgreco]

Suggest you start over a bit.

Things to know:

1) A lot of hardware ranges from a little flaky to insanely intolerable. Turn it around and start out from what works well. You want redundant power supplies and a 1U 4 drive package? You're probably looking for something like the Supermicro 5017C-MTRF. The board's known to work very well. The chassis is probably what we'd be using here if we weren't recycling legacy 1U's.

2) You want a RAID controller? Would you really buy a Mack truck and then try to tow it with a Ford F150? Yes they're both "trucks". But ZFS wants to be your RAID controller. Your ZFS system will have a quad core CPU and many gigs of RAM. Why would you want a little PowerPC 800MHz CPU and half a gig of RAM to be in charge of talking to your drives? For ZFS you basically just need to be able to attach the drives without all that RAID controller fuss. For a 4 drive system, you will be very happy with what the manufacturer provided on the mainboard.

3) ZFS will let you mirror or do RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2, or RAIDZ3 (given sufficient drives). Mirroring is fast. The RAIDZ levels are progressively a bit slower.

4) If your ultimate goal is to have NFS export, use FreeNAS to do the NFS.

5) I'm sure 8GB sounds like a lot of memory to you. ZFS will eat it all and make good use of it. So see if you can figure out how large your working set is - that's the set of things your storage is frequently retrieving (let's say at least once an hour). Because ZFS is totally awesome if you can fit your working set in memory. If you discover that your working set is 100GB, then you can seriously look at a server with 64GB or 128GB of RAM and make totally awesome use to serve up website content with minimal latency. That means a socket 2011 based mainboard (and Supermicro has options for you there as well).

6) The hardware forum has a sticky that specifically discusses some hardware suggestions.

7) If you expect to have heavy write volumes of sync data, then you may need a ZIL SLOG device, which complicates things if you want to go into a 1U form factor.

8) In many ways, ZFS is a Hulk-sized filesystem, and can be slower than FFS, slower than XFS, slower than EXT3, etc. If you do not pay careful, proper, and well-considered attention to how you design a ZFS system, you may be sad and sorry. If, on the other hand, you learn its strengths, and design to properly resource it, you can wind up with an amazing fileserver.