A little background first: We are a small film restoration studio, typically dealing with files that are large. Very large. Either 250GB+ Quicktime files, or huge sets of image sequences (think 30MB/file x 130,000 for a single feature length film). Our current setup is a homegrown 250TB SAN consisting of a 40Gb ethernet network, a CentOS server running four 10-drive hardware RAID-6 pools that are served up as various sized iSCSI volumes to a TigerStore server running on Windows. It works well for us, has the performance we need, and has been great so far. Except for the occasional hardware failure. usually these are minor - slap in a replacement drive and let it rebuild the pool over a weekend and you're good. But we did have a RAID card fail at one point and while it would have been recoverable, it took too long to figure out the problem was the RAID controller, and some data was lost due to human error, before it could be properly backed up.
I am not interested in running FreeNAS on the main SAN or changing that system in any way. it works well, and we're extremely happy with it.
Anyway, I've got a friend who runs a university datacenter that just moved and upgraded/consolidated all their cluster computing and storage systems. He called me and asked if I wanted "some servers" that they were about to recycle. We had been talking about building a system to be a kind of live backup for the SAN, to just mirror it in case things go pear-shaped in the future. So I said sure I'll take them (not really knowing what I'd get), and a couple days later he shows up with a mini van full of Dell PowerEdge R515 servers with all the rackmount hardware. I'm thinking "Christmas!" -- and then we lugged it all up to the office and stacked it in the server room and after my back stopped hurting, I'm thinking - "what the hell am I going to do with these?"
Each one has 12x 4TB SAS drives currently in RAID 6, so somewhere around 40TB per unit. There are 11 servers. Most have 10GbE PCIe cards in them so we can easily integrate them into our existing network. While the 4TB drives in them provide more than enough aggregate storage to cover our SAN, that's a lot of machines to run and probably a lot of electricity. I'm thinking I might pare it down to 3-4 of these and start putting bigger drives in some of them. We use shucked WD EasyStores (8 and 10GB) in the SAN and they've been great. A quick look at the specs for the server says they work with SAS or SATA (but is that SAS *and* SATA or is it *or* -- as in, I can only put SAS drives in these machines)? I haven't even powered one of these up yet, let alonge taking one apart to see what's inside.
But next week we're doing year-end backups of things and I'll have a little free time, so I was thinking of messing with one or two to do some testing.
My friend's suggestion is to use Gluster for this system, but I have zero experience with it and not a ton of time to experiment with something new. I've played with FreeNAS in the past, but it wasn't suitable for our setup with the kinds of file sets we deal with, for our primary SAN. I'm thinking though, it might be good for this backup system, which just needs to quietly run in the background and performance isn't as much of an issue.
So the question is - where should I start? Is FreeNAS the way to go or should I be looking at something else? What about software to back up the files on the SAN in some automated way?
I am not interested in running FreeNAS on the main SAN or changing that system in any way. it works well, and we're extremely happy with it.
Anyway, I've got a friend who runs a university datacenter that just moved and upgraded/consolidated all their cluster computing and storage systems. He called me and asked if I wanted "some servers" that they were about to recycle. We had been talking about building a system to be a kind of live backup for the SAN, to just mirror it in case things go pear-shaped in the future. So I said sure I'll take them (not really knowing what I'd get), and a couple days later he shows up with a mini van full of Dell PowerEdge R515 servers with all the rackmount hardware. I'm thinking "Christmas!" -- and then we lugged it all up to the office and stacked it in the server room and after my back stopped hurting, I'm thinking - "what the hell am I going to do with these?"
Each one has 12x 4TB SAS drives currently in RAID 6, so somewhere around 40TB per unit. There are 11 servers. Most have 10GbE PCIe cards in them so we can easily integrate them into our existing network. While the 4TB drives in them provide more than enough aggregate storage to cover our SAN, that's a lot of machines to run and probably a lot of electricity. I'm thinking I might pare it down to 3-4 of these and start putting bigger drives in some of them. We use shucked WD EasyStores (8 and 10GB) in the SAN and they've been great. A quick look at the specs for the server says they work with SAS or SATA (but is that SAS *and* SATA or is it *or* -- as in, I can only put SAS drives in these machines)? I haven't even powered one of these up yet, let alonge taking one apart to see what's inside.
But next week we're doing year-end backups of things and I'll have a little free time, so I was thinking of messing with one or two to do some testing.
My friend's suggestion is to use Gluster for this system, but I have zero experience with it and not a ton of time to experiment with something new. I've played with FreeNAS in the past, but it wasn't suitable for our setup with the kinds of file sets we deal with, for our primary SAN. I'm thinking though, it might be good for this backup system, which just needs to quietly run in the background and performance isn't as much of an issue.
So the question is - where should I start? Is FreeNAS the way to go or should I be looking at something else? What about software to back up the files on the SAN in some automated way?