Hi!
I’ve been tasked with speccing up a fileserver for a small but rapidly expanding film studio. I have decided on a rough specification as listed below, I’d be interested to hear what you lovely people think please. Criticisms welcome!
Requirements are:
* Users will be editing RAW footage direct from the server, so it must be capable of 500MB/s per user, for 2-3 users at a time
* There must be room for expansion, in terms of adding more HDD storage later on as our archives grow
* It must be kept to a semi-reasonable price, i.e. below 35000 Norwegian kroner (around $3-4k) - not including disk price, as we’re buying those separately
* It must also be capable of doing some video encoding/transcoding - I’m not a fan of this idea because a fileserver should do the job of a fileserver and nothing more, but we’re working to a budget and can’t afford another dedicated encoding server right now
* 6TB of SSD scratch space, capable of 1500MB/s+ for editing over the 10GbE network
* 12TB of HDD archive space, project files will be moved from scratch to here when the project is completed
My decisions so far:
* We’re going with a custom built Supermicro server from a vendor called Nextron in Norway, Dell is another option but the options in the Norwegian Dell store are somewhat limited, it’s hard to find a Dell server with 16+ 3.5” drive bays
* OS will either be FreeNAS, FreeBSD with me configuring ZFS and everything else manually, or Linux+mdadm if ZFS doesn’t cut it with the speeds
* Supermicro chassis, capable of housing 16x 3.5” and will come with 3.5” to 2.5” drive bay converters
* 4x 2TB Samsung 850 EVOs in a RAID-Z1, 500MB/s sequential read/writes each, from what I understand, these drives in this RAID config should be capable of at least 1500MB/s sequential, other RAID configs are possible if not
* 4x 4TB HGST enterprise drives in RAID-Z1 or RAID-Z2 for archive
* Xeon E5-2620v4 2.10Ghz, should be plenty for a fileserver, along with some occasional video encoding
* 32GB ECC RAM
* 2x 80GB SSDs in RAID-1 for OS
* Intel X540 dual 10GbE NIC (compatible with the latest stable FreeNAS, which is FreeBSD 10.3, afaik?)
* Server will be connected to a Netgear XS708T 10Gbps switch via 2x Cat6A cables in a LACP LAG link aggregation group
* All connected to a CyberPower Online UPS
* We’ll eventually be purchasing an LTO-7 tape drive for archiving old project file when we run out of HDD archive space
* The server alone comes to around 34000 kroner ex VAT ($4000)
What do you guys/gals think? :)
Thanks!
I’ve been tasked with speccing up a fileserver for a small but rapidly expanding film studio. I have decided on a rough specification as listed below, I’d be interested to hear what you lovely people think please. Criticisms welcome!
Requirements are:
* Users will be editing RAW footage direct from the server, so it must be capable of 500MB/s per user, for 2-3 users at a time
* There must be room for expansion, in terms of adding more HDD storage later on as our archives grow
* It must be kept to a semi-reasonable price, i.e. below 35000 Norwegian kroner (around $3-4k) - not including disk price, as we’re buying those separately
* It must also be capable of doing some video encoding/transcoding - I’m not a fan of this idea because a fileserver should do the job of a fileserver and nothing more, but we’re working to a budget and can’t afford another dedicated encoding server right now
* 6TB of SSD scratch space, capable of 1500MB/s+ for editing over the 10GbE network
* 12TB of HDD archive space, project files will be moved from scratch to here when the project is completed
My decisions so far:
* We’re going with a custom built Supermicro server from a vendor called Nextron in Norway, Dell is another option but the options in the Norwegian Dell store are somewhat limited, it’s hard to find a Dell server with 16+ 3.5” drive bays
* OS will either be FreeNAS, FreeBSD with me configuring ZFS and everything else manually, or Linux+mdadm if ZFS doesn’t cut it with the speeds
* Supermicro chassis, capable of housing 16x 3.5” and will come with 3.5” to 2.5” drive bay converters
* 4x 2TB Samsung 850 EVOs in a RAID-Z1, 500MB/s sequential read/writes each, from what I understand, these drives in this RAID config should be capable of at least 1500MB/s sequential, other RAID configs are possible if not
* 4x 4TB HGST enterprise drives in RAID-Z1 or RAID-Z2 for archive
* Xeon E5-2620v4 2.10Ghz, should be plenty for a fileserver, along with some occasional video encoding
* 32GB ECC RAM
* 2x 80GB SSDs in RAID-1 for OS
* Intel X540 dual 10GbE NIC (compatible with the latest stable FreeNAS, which is FreeBSD 10.3, afaik?)
* Server will be connected to a Netgear XS708T 10Gbps switch via 2x Cat6A cables in a LACP LAG link aggregation group
* All connected to a CyberPower Online UPS
* We’ll eventually be purchasing an LTO-7 tape drive for archiving old project file when we run out of HDD archive space
* The server alone comes to around 34000 kroner ex VAT ($4000)
What do you guys/gals think? :)
Thanks!