FreeNAS or OpenIndiana/Nappit hardware advice

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JDT

New Member
Feb 11, 2016
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Overland Park, KS USA
First post as a member, longtime reader.

I have weighed the pros and cons of DIY vs commercial (synology) NASs and have decided to roll my own.

Environment:
Rack mount
Connection Symmetrical gigabit fiber
pfSense UTM on Dell r210 with E3-1240
Ubiquiti Switch with SFP/SFP+
Virtualization on Dell r710 with dual L5640s

I am wanting to setup a NAS to file serve and provide Backup / Time Machine services. Media transcoding will be handled by virtualized server on the r710. I have been looking at the following

Processor: E3-1240v5
Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSH-CTF
Chassis: Supermicro SC836TQ-R800
RAM: 64GB ECC
NIC: 10Gb SFP+ add in
Drives: 8x HGST Deskstar NAS H3IKNAS40003272SN, ZFS Z3
Users: 10 concurrent

Thoughts on components and ability to keep up with data requests?
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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The X11SSH-CTF with 12G SAS HBA and 2 x 10G with CPUs up from a cheap G4400 that support ECC and vt-d is one of the best of the upcoming 1151 boards. Currently the new X550 nic is not supported everywhere (Illumos).

May not relevant if you add a SFP+ nic or use ESXi with a storage VM as base and a failoversystem to the Dell.

If you want to look at a free OS from the Solaris family, check OmniOS. The new OpenIndiana Hipster may be a good option in future but currently OmniOS is prefereable as it is stable with a very active development and a superiour performance regarding SMB 2+ in the upcoming release. NFS is very fast on both OI and OmniOS as both depend on Illumos, the free Solaris fork where NFS and ZFS comes from.
 

JDT

New Member
Feb 11, 2016
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Overland Park, KS USA
Great insight on the G4400! Much cheaper with little penalty on power consumption. Was looking at SFP+ NICs because the wattage required is significantly less and there is better support. Will definitely look into omnios as well. If I remember, it's build schedule is much more regimented than freenas?
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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If I remember, it's build schedule is much more regimented than freenas?
You cannot compare.
FreeNas is a complete NAS distribution based on Free-BSD that includes a GUI and a lot of 3rd party services, tools and apps.

OmniOS is an absolut minimalistic "Just enough Storage Server OS". As Solaris included all basic storage services developed by Sun (iSCSI, NFS and the kernelbased SMB server) they do not need to care about 3rd party services. This allows OmniTi to offer a stable every 6 months beside a long term stable to include all the new features from Illumos where the ZFS development is done.
 
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JDT

New Member
Feb 11, 2016
3
0
1
46
Overland Park, KS USA
Any recommendation on HBAs? I am considering going with the X11SSi-LN4F instead due to the air scoop in the chassis. Since this drops the onboard LSI 3008, I am needing to install an HBA (as I understand it.) This will be my first storage build so any insight is greatly appreciated.