Fileserver Upgrade: S775 to Haswell

[sotech]

Our oldest fileserver is soon to see the final day of service; it's full and only utilising half of the chassis it's in, so it's time to upgrade.

Existing build:

Intel Q9400
Intel S3200SHV
8GB ECC DDR2
Norco 4224
M1015 (IT)
2x Crucial M4 as OS mirror
12x2TB WD Green HDDs
Seasonic X-560 Gold PSU

Forthcoming:

...and a bunch more stuff that hasn't arrived yet.

We want to enable compression on this server as well as the others; tried enabling gzip (default level 6) on a pool and the CPU load went up to ~18.xx when transferring from a non-compressed pool to the compressed pool and performance wasn't exactly stellar. Based on the S2011 and 12xxv2 builds we've done, there should be a significant improvement there with the new kit.

Incidentally, the 775 build has been rock solid for years - not a single issue. Here's hoping the more feature-laden current boards fare as well.

More to come as the build progresses.

 

[Patrick]

Awesome! I just saw the e-mail you sent me. Assuming you got everything OK at this point? I am in the middle of 7 weeks in a row where I am travelling at least a part of the week. Let me know if you still need something.

BTW what are you doing with the Plextor?

 

[sotech]

Awesome! I just saw the e-mail you sent me. Assuming you got everything OK at this point? I am in the middle of 7 weeks in a row where I am travelling at least a part of the week. Let me know if you still need something.

BTW what are you doing with the Plextor?

All good, thanks - apart from one thing. Do you know of anywhere one can buy the ASMB7-iKVM add-on module? The local distributors have no idea when they'll be getting it and can't even give me an ETA on any of the Haswell server boards, let alone anything else...

The Plextor drives are going to be the VM storage pool. This server had a handful of VMs running on a single-vdev spinning disk pool and the performance was getting kind of ugly, and I'd like to add in some more VMs to the server so a change had to happen.

 

[sotech]

Further parts:

32GB ECC RAM:

 

[Patrick]

Good looking board. We are getting an ASUS UP set soon. Not sure if it will have the 7. Would it work with the 6?

 

[sotech]

Good looking board. We are getting an ASUS UP set soon. Not sure if it will have the 7. Would it work with the 6?

The pins are on the motherboard, not on the add-on card like the ASMB6 etc. - they flipped the orientation for 7, it would seem. Which is kind of unfortunate as I have spare ASMB4 and ASMB6 chips laying about :/

 

[TangoWhiskey9]

I just wanna know why they don't just have an all time available solution. Make it so you can disable with a jumper.

I know about margins, but really man. Can see your frustration

 

[sotech]

Board is in:

Very impressed so far. Will post some more pics and comparative benchmarks when I get time!

 

[pgh5278]

WOW, You have good connections, didn't think these were available here in OZ yet..
Good Luck...PGH

 

[sotech]

WOW, You have good connections, didn't think these were available here in OZ yet..
Good Luck...PGH

I had a chat to one of the local distributors a fortnight ago and they said they were expecting stock sometime later this quarter - they weren't able to give me a solid date, though. I'll be very interested to see what price they are domestically.