Build Guidance (Medical Research/Backup)

[BLUEDOG314]

Hi folks. Newbie poster, but have a FreeNAS server at home used for various purposes. My question involves making a high capacity build, around 100TB give or take, for storing reconstructed medical images along with their preconstructed parts.

Generally, the device will serve like I said to store medical images, so it has to have a good level of redundancy. IOPS are not a huge concern, but the machine that produces images churns out about 3.8-4GB of data in about 30 seconds. This data is currently held on a staging computer with SSDs then moved to our current holding solution at a rate it can handle. As needed, the preconstructed images are moved back to the holding machine to be combined and rendered. The rendered images are also then pushed back to our storage solution. The current solution is also accessed by various other machines to pull reconstructions for research purposes. Currently everything is running on 1Gbps interfaces.

Along with data redundancy we would like to remove the 1Gbps bottleneck and build something that can juggle data with the holding/rendering machine faster to improve workflow. This had me thinking of including some sort of mirrored SSD write cache. For the hard drives I've heard folks talk about mirrored vdevs along with or in place of RAIDZ. Not sure what makes the most sense here.

Anyway, I suppose after trying to research on my own I quickly realized the hardware needed is beyond my current knowledge, so any advice is appreciated. Thanks!!

 

[melloa]

Anyway, I suppose after trying to research on my own I quickly realized the hardware needed is beyond my current knowledge

I'd go with One of this solutions.

 

[thewizard]

Agreed unless you are willing to invest a lot more time researching, you can start with the recommended hardware it's not that difficult. But it is a learning curve and if this is for commercial purposes even the smallest unit of the TrueNAS linked above has 10GB ethernet and supports 500TB of storage.

Your write requirements are certainly not insane 4GB per 30 seconds is 133MB per second, only really a tad beyond 1GB ethernet ~(120MB per second). You can saturate 1GB ethernet with six disks in RAIDZ2 so if you go for a 10-12 disk solution on 10GB ethernet you should have no issues.

 

[BLUEDOG314]

Thanks to the both of you. While I was thinking this would be fun to build from the ground up, the TrueNAS solutions look very good especially since the university I work at likes vendor support.

 

[Ndyndili]

this is very useful, thank you!

 

[Ndyndili]

I recently purchased such a device. Everything works just fine, I advise you too.

https://edubirdie.com/reflective-essay-writing-service

 

[Jessep]

You do NOT want to primary support for a production device if this is not your job. All the downsides of blame and responsibility and none of the upsides of credit.

In addition tuning such a setup between networking and NAS/SAN design to get full performance is an art as much as a science.

Agree with other advice, buy a supported device with full support contract. Likely also get a professional to tune your networking for 10Gb/50Gb/100Gb between the staging and main storage.