Certified FreeNAS 4U or double 2U?

[eretron]

Hello,

we are currently operating 2 FreeNas in house built servers, one is raidz2 (6 disks) and the other box iz raidz1 (5 disks), where the box 1 replicate itself via Rsync to the box 2 for the sake of mirrored data.

It works great for the past 3-4 years...

Now since there is a need for a bigger storage, we are considering going with FreeNas certified boxes from iXsystems...

My question is this... Do we go with 1 4U box, with mirrored volumes, or should we stay with double boxes setup for a added redundancy?

Thanks in advance

 

[sretalla]

You're posing the question to yourself already... redundancy vs cost (vs need).

If you think it will cost you more than the extra cost of going 2x2 (for the same storage capacity... including a backup to a second pool... in the 4x1 setup) if your box is down (probably motherboard failure as the only option in the scenarios I can see) while you source another one to restore your operations, then it's worth the 2x2... knowing that you'll run out of future growth capacity faster.

If downtime is not a really big deal and you just care about protecting your data you might consider the single 4x1 option and use a cloud backup strategy (if you really care about your data in case of a fire or theft).

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

That's really a question for your organization.

If your data is critical and your recovery window small, two boxes is a solid choice. If you're fine with being down for some period of time while recovering from your backups, then one box would be more economical.

Cheers,
Matt