A specific usage of the TinyMiniMicro servers.

[kalaspuffar]

Hi everyone.

I've been trying to create a local Ceph cluster both for backup and for testing. We are running a more extensive cluster at work with a lot of computing power and memory, and when I checked GB per cent, the 2TB SSD disk was the best price. So we bought a lot of them.

Locally I've bought four different hosts with 4-5TB disks to get redundance and try different hardware and scaling. These hosts would probably be considered in the TinyMiniMicro project series. I watched all of them get some inspiration, which inspired me to make my hardware video; I realized that I'm not a pro.

Watching the series, I was wondering if the M90n-IoT would be a good host. But I don't know if the thicker hard drives will fit in that form factor.

I loved the simplicity of the Lenovo M900 and M920x. But then again, the hard drive trays could be an issue with larger units.

What I'm looking for in a host is a lower power footprint for the environment, lower price, one extra hard drive bay where you can put an inexpensive drive, and at least 4GB of memory.

The actual CPU is less important in a Ceph cluster if you don't have a lot of through-put, and in a local test environment, performance is not priority no 1.

Thank you so much for a fascinating series, and looking forward to more videos when you got your studio in order.

Best regards
Daniel

 

[WANg]

Hi everyone.

I've been trying to create a local Ceph cluster both for backup and for testing. We are running a more extensive cluster at work with a lot of computing power and memory, and when I checked GB per cent, the 2TB SSD disk was the best price. So we bought a lot of them.

Locally I've bought four different hosts with 4-5TB disks to get redundance and try different hardware and scaling. These hosts would probably be considered in the TinyMiniMicro project series. I watched all of them get some inspiration, which inspired me to make my hardware video; I realized that I'm not a pro.

Watching the series, I was wondering if the M90n-IoT would be a good host. But I don't know if the thicker hard drives will fit in that form factor.

I loved the simplicity of the Lenovo M900 and M920x. But then again, the hard drive trays could be an issue with larger units.

What I'm looking for in a host is a lower power footprint for the environment, lower price, one extra hard drive bay where you can put an inexpensive drive, and at least 4GB of memory.

The actual CPU is less important in a Ceph cluster if you don't have a lot of through-put, and in a local test environment, performance is not priority no 1.

Thank you so much for a fascinating series, and looking forward to more videos when you got your studio in order.

Best regards
Daniel

Well, the TinyMiniMicros (TMMa) are an idea, but it’s far from the only idea. So here’s a few things that makes them not great Ceph nodes:

a) Most modern TMM machines either don’t take 2.5” drives, or their 2.5” HDD bays are 7mm, so a “thicc boi” 15mm z-height Seagate Barracuda 4-5TBs are not going to fit.

b) 2.5” HDD development pretty much stopped dead in its tracks in 2017 or so - I haven’t seen any 2.5” SATA/consumer drives go past 5TB - and those tend to be the slower, less performant 5400 rpm drives. I didn’t see any normal consumer 7200 rpm 2.5” drives go above 1TB, and frankly, given the fact that you can get something like a Crucial MX500 for less than 100 USD, the performance 2.5” HDD market vanished.

You might see some 2.5” SAS drives (often misrepresented as SATA on sites like Newegg or Aliexpress) but those are usually rather expensive…to the point where SSDs makes more sense (4TB QLCs are around 360 USD on a good day)

c) TMM machines are meant to be small - I mean, for a cheap machine with RAM, computing, and a tattooed Windows license, they are great ideas, but for I/O? They often only have a single gigabit NIC (often Realtek based)and maybe RAID1 NVMe SSD onboard, otherwise airflow for long term usage with rust-spinners can be a problem.

Then there is the headache of soldered RAM on the Lenovo IoT machines. Either you overpay for more soldered RAM from the factory, or you buy a machine with only 4GB soldered in to save some money, and then buy a new machine when you run out. Remember that your modern DDR4 equipped dual SODIMM slot equipped machines (not Atom based) can have up to 64GB in total.

In this use case as a distributed storage node you might be better off thinking beyond the TMM nodes. Maybe the HPe EC200a or its NC200a equivalent. Or go one step up on the sizing and get the bigger sister to the TMM/“Corporate NUC”, which are the SFF machines. They can usually take an NVMe SSD for boot, 1-2 3.5” drives (which are much cheaper per GB and the 7200 rpm variants makes for better near-line storage) and a PCIe slot to plug in a 10/40/100Gb fiber Ethernet card (if needed be).

 

[Evan]

I have 5 x HPe EC200a as Ceph play thing, sure only 1G Ethernet but at least you get 2 interfaces, there is 2 sata drive bays, 3.5” or with cheap adapters 2.5” and a m.2 NVMe.
worked for me cheap as I had ram, and a bunch of 2TB 2.5” data disk and the m.2 I sourced cheap.
whole setup cost $1000 so for me worth while for what I used it for.