I am the Director of Information Systems for a medium sized non-profit. I am looking to build or purchase a "SANs" system. For my whitebox solution, I was looking into using FreeNAS. I have a current FreeNAS running as a file server for my department for the last few years. It has been solid and stable.
Here is the whitebox solution I have been looking into.
Case:
SUPERMICRO CSE-216E16-R1200LPB Black 2U Rackmount Server Case
MB:
SUPERMICRO MBD-X10DRI-T4+-O Enhanced Extended ATX Xeon Server Motherboard Dual LGA 2011 Intel C612
Processor:
Intel Xeon E5-2660 v2 Ivy Bridge-EP 2.2 GHz LGA 2011 95W BX80635E52660V2 Server Processor
Controller:
areca ARC-1883ix24-8SA PCI-Express 3.0 x8 SAS RAID Adapter
Memory:
Kingston 32GB ECC DDR4 2133 (PC4 17000) Server Memory LRDIMM QR x4 w/TS Model KVR21L15Q4/32
Cache Drives:
Intel Fultondale 3 DC P3600 AIC 400GB PCI-Express 3.0 MLC Solid State Drive - OEM
Storage Drives:
Kingston SSDNow KC300 SKC300S37A/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III Enterprise Solid State Drive with Adapter
The setup would feature Quad 10gbe, Dual Processor, PCIe SSD for 400 GB of caching (in/out), 24 SSD as storage drives (RAID-Z3) and memory maxed to 768GB.
Priced at about $17,000 USD.
My goal here is maximum performance for multiple SQL databases including our new ERP system. Secondary use use of Hyper-V for MS Terminal Server or Individual VMs. Most of this would be done via iSCSI over 10gbe.
Some other SAN/NAS units/companies I am looking into are PureStorage, Tegile, and Nimble. My secondary option for the whitebox would to use MS Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, which I am currently using for all my VM servers.
Q1: Tiered Storage - Does FreeNAS set a priority of RAM>PCIe SSD > SSD Storage in the configuration. I know that SSD caching is possible.
Q2: FUTURE QUESTIONS