Hello Everyone.
I've been a lurker on this forum for a while, but I decided to post a build to pool your wonderful knowledge.
Build’s Name: Hartford Stage Audio & Projections Department Large File Server
Operating System/ Storage Platform: TBD
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon X5650 6core LGA1366
Motherboard: Supermicro X8DT6-F LGA1366
Chassis: Supermicro SC836E26-R1200
Drives: 4 tb White Label Drives (16 total slowly) 2 SSD's write cache, 1 SSD OS
RAM: Hynix 6x4GB DDR3-1333MHz ECC Registered
Add-in Cards: TBD
Power Supply: Supermicro Redundant 1200watt
Other Bits: Gigabit network with 2 SG300 switches 2 port LACP trunk between them. 5 VLans. Dell2950 dual quad 3.0gig 32gig running pfsense and 5 instances of windows 8
Usage Profile: We do theatrical productions with large file projection components as well as small file audio components. We will need this server to consolidate all of our external drives to quickly serve and hold files for these 1.5 month productions.
Other information… The biggest thing that I'm questioning is What OS / FS to use. We don't really need iSCSI as this would be better off with multiple computers accessing at the same time. What would be beneficial is a system that would allow us to add a 4TB disk or 2 per show until we were maxed out with all 16 drives. I don't have the budget to do it all at once, but we can definitely handle 1-2 drives at a time. XFS seems to not like to expand easily. Windows 2012R2 can expand, but it seems to be quite slow. BTRFS sounds like it would be perfect, but I haven't found a relatively easy to use solution that uses it.
I have also thought about ignoring the filesystem, and focusing more on a HW Raid card that could handle an SSD cache in either Raid 50 or 60. This option seems promising, but it also seems to have some corruption pitfalls with such a large amount of storage.
All of the audio files (1-5 gigs per show) will be handled by the local computers, but the video files (1-2TB a show) would be handled by this system, and hopefully the audio files would be able to be long term backed up to this system.
The motherboard has 2 LSI 2008 based 8087 sas ports. I was going to connect each of these to the backplane of the chassis (it has multiple 8087 sas ports for expansion and for daisy chaining to another chassis if needed) I've read about multipath and fallover sas connections, but I'm not majorly knowledgeable about this at this point. Still need to read up more.
Any suggestions or thoughts would be Greatly Appreciated!
Thanks
Marshall Simmons
Hartford Stage
Audio & Projections Supervisor
I've been a lurker on this forum for a while, but I decided to post a build to pool your wonderful knowledge.
Build’s Name: Hartford Stage Audio & Projections Department Large File Server
Operating System/ Storage Platform: TBD
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon X5650 6core LGA1366
Motherboard: Supermicro X8DT6-F LGA1366
Chassis: Supermicro SC836E26-R1200
Drives: 4 tb White Label Drives (16 total slowly) 2 SSD's write cache, 1 SSD OS
RAM: Hynix 6x4GB DDR3-1333MHz ECC Registered
Add-in Cards: TBD
Power Supply: Supermicro Redundant 1200watt
Other Bits: Gigabit network with 2 SG300 switches 2 port LACP trunk between them. 5 VLans. Dell2950 dual quad 3.0gig 32gig running pfsense and 5 instances of windows 8
Usage Profile: We do theatrical productions with large file projection components as well as small file audio components. We will need this server to consolidate all of our external drives to quickly serve and hold files for these 1.5 month productions.
Other information… The biggest thing that I'm questioning is What OS / FS to use. We don't really need iSCSI as this would be better off with multiple computers accessing at the same time. What would be beneficial is a system that would allow us to add a 4TB disk or 2 per show until we were maxed out with all 16 drives. I don't have the budget to do it all at once, but we can definitely handle 1-2 drives at a time. XFS seems to not like to expand easily. Windows 2012R2 can expand, but it seems to be quite slow. BTRFS sounds like it would be perfect, but I haven't found a relatively easy to use solution that uses it.
I have also thought about ignoring the filesystem, and focusing more on a HW Raid card that could handle an SSD cache in either Raid 50 or 60. This option seems promising, but it also seems to have some corruption pitfalls with such a large amount of storage.
All of the audio files (1-5 gigs per show) will be handled by the local computers, but the video files (1-2TB a show) would be handled by this system, and hopefully the audio files would be able to be long term backed up to this system.
The motherboard has 2 LSI 2008 based 8087 sas ports. I was going to connect each of these to the backplane of the chassis (it has multiple 8087 sas ports for expansion and for daisy chaining to another chassis if needed) I've read about multipath and fallover sas connections, but I'm not majorly knowledgeable about this at this point. Still need to read up more.
Any suggestions or thoughts would be Greatly Appreciated!
Thanks
Marshall Simmons
Hartford Stage
Audio & Projections Supervisor
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