First Build Check-up

[Summerrefill]

Greetings everyone. I am in the process of building my first FreeNAS server to store company data and would like to get some opinions on it from those more experienced. I appreciate your help in advance!

To provide a bit of background, I am building this server to store and share data among a small team of 6. We generate around 200-300GB per week on average containing mostly images and videos, but we also create a handful of 3D models which can contain up to hundreds of thousands of tiny files. We are quickly outgrowing our current 4-bay NAS, so after some expedited research I've invested in a retired 36-bay supermicro server for use with FreeNAS.

Here's the current hardware list:
CPU - 2x Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2
Mobo - X9DRD-7LN4F-JBOD
RAM - 128GB ECC DDR3 (8x16GB)
HBA - LSI SAS2308 (IT Mode)
Case - 36 bay supermicro LFF
PSU - 2x PWS-920P-1R
Boot - 32GB Cruzer USB (Also have 128GB and 256GB ADATA SSD's I may use in place)

I received the server and have become familiar with installing and configuring FreeNAS. I am now working on the pool layouts, networking, and file shares:

Pool layouts – For the storage pools I had the idea to create two storage tiers, hot and cold. Hot storage would be a pool of SSDs containing data that was captured/generated within the past 3 months. The Cold storage would then be a pool of HDDs with everything older than 3 months. This is the starting configuration I have in mind:
Hot Storage: 6x 2TB Samsung 860 EVO (3x mirrored vdev pairs)
Cold Storage: 12x 10TB WD Red (2x Raid-Z2 vdevs of 6 disks)

With this configuration I would look to upgrade by purchasing 2x 2TB 860 EVOs to add to the hot storage, and 6x 10TB WD Red to add to the cold storage. I also have some NVME storage already that I was looking to use, but I’m not sure if there would be any performance increase over the SSDs.

Networking – Our workstations are currently on a 10GbE network, so I plan to utilize that with our FreeNAS. I’m looking to purchase a Chelsio T420-BT for this.

File Shares – All of our current workstations use Windows 10, so I plan to set up a SMB share for access to the stored data. Each workstation is joined to our Azure Active Directory for user authentication, but I am not sure if AAD is compatible with FreeNAS. I am open to other options for user auth but I would like to keep it integrated with our existing Microsoft accounts if possible.

Please let me know your thoughts on my system and if you see anything I may have overlooked. Thanks!

 

[Jessep]

Hardware plans look fine, you might want to up the RAM sooner rather than later before DDR3 gets expensive, 256GB should be enough before you will replace the hardware.
Pools and expansion plans look fine.
Networking, 10Gb can be more of an art form to get the best performance. Be prepared to do a lot of testing and tweaking if you want max performance.
File shares, hopefully someone else will chime in.

Backup plans? That's a lot of data, start planning it now. (Second FreeNAS box? Tape? Frequency? Offsite? Encryption?)
UPS?
Cold spares, tested good drives on the shelf?

 

[Summerrefill]

Thanks Jessep. I had planned to upgrade to 256GB of RAM eventually but wasn't aware of a price increase in the forecast. It's reassuring to get confirmation on the hardware/pools since I'm hitting the ground running on this one.

Good to know ahead of time that 10GbE networking can be finicky. I had initially planned to run a pool of NVME drives for the hot storage, but after researching I thought that 3x SSD mirrors would be able to saturate a 10GbE connection. As long as it's reasonably fast, we should be fine.

We have no offsite backup at the moment but I'm urgently working to change that. We're a young company that's growing quickly so I'm aware we have a few gaps to fill. Eventually I plan to use this current box as the offsite backup and replace it with something better, but I expect that I'm atleast 6-12mo out from that. Cloud backup is also an option I'm considering, but our current internet bandwidth is horrible (12.5Mbps). We hope to be moving to a gigabit connection soon so then we can see.

I plan to use the built in FreeNAS encryption for all pools. Are there any surprises to be aware of in doing this? It seems fairly straight forward to configure when setting up the pool.

For the UPS I have a Cyberpower 1500VA. I have just ordered the 10TB WD Red drives and did not include any cold spares. As soon as I'm done with the burn in, I'll likely grab 2 additional to keep on hand.

 

[Jessep]

Encryption can make recovery much more complicated, really think it through if you need it.

Likely if you have a secure server room with good cyber security practices it's not needed unless you are running in tenancy (on someone else's hardware or in someone else's rack).