Hello,
I have been researching building a home storage server based on
OpenSolaris and ZFS, and I would appreciate any time people could take
to comment on my current leanings.
I've tried to gather old information from this list as well as the
HCL, but I would welcome anyone's experience on both compatibility and
appropriateness for my goals. I'd love if that white box server wiki
page were set up now, but for now I'll have to just ask here.
My priorities:
1) Data security. I'm hoping I can get this via ECC RAM and
enterprise drives that hopefully don't lie to ZFS about flushing to
disk? I'll run mirrored pools for redundancy (which leads me to want
a case w/a lot of bays).
2) Compatibility. For me this translates into low upkeep cost
(time). I'm not looking to be the first person to get OpenSolaris
running on some particular piece of hardware.
3) Scaleable. I'd like to not have to upgrade every year. I can
always use something like an external JBOD array, but there's some
appeal to having enough space in the case for reasonable growth. I'd
also like to have enough performance to keep up with scaling data
volume and ZFS features.
4) Ability to run some other (lightweight) services on the box. I'll
be using NFS (iTunes libraries for OS X clients) and iSCSI (Time
Machine backups) primarily, but my current home server also runs a few
small services (MySQL etc...) that are very lightweight but
nevertheless might be difficult to do on a ZFS (or "ZFS like") appliance
5) Cost. All things being equal cheaper is better, but I'm willing
to pay more to accomplish particularly 1-3 above.
My current thinking:
SuperMicro 7046A-3 Workstation
http://supermicro.com/products/system/4U/7046/SYS-7046A-3.cfm
8 hot swappable drive bays (SAS or SATA, I'd use SATA)
Network/Main board/SAS/SATA controllers seem well supported by
OpenSolaris
Will take IPMI card for remote admin (with video and iso redirection)
12 RAM slots so I can buy less dense chips
2x 5.25" drive bays. I'd use a SuperMicro Mobile Rack M14T (http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/mobilerack/CSE-M14.cfm
) to get 4 2.5" SAS drives in one of these. 2 would be used for a
mirrored boot pool leaving 2 for potential future use (like a ZIL on
SSD).
Nehalem E5520 CPU
These are clearly more than enough now, but I'm hoping to have decent
CPU performance for say 5 years (and I'm willing to pay for it up
front vs. upgrading every 2 years...I don't want this to be too time
consuming of a hobby). I'd like to have processor capacity for
compression and (hopefully reasonably soon) de-duplication as well as
obviously support ECC RAM.
Crucial RAM in 4 GB density (price scales linearly up through this
point and I've had good support from Crucial)
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB SATA (Model ST31000340NS) for storage
pool. I would like to use a larger drive, but I can't find anything
rated to run 24x7 larger than 1TB from Seagate. I'd like to have
drives rated for 24x7 use, and I've had good experience w/Seagate.
Again, a larger case gives me some flexibility here.
Misc (mainly interested in compatibility b/c it will hardly be used):
Sun XVR-100 video card from eBay
Syba SY-PCI45004 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124025
) IDE card for CD-ROM
Sony DDU1678A (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827131061
) CD-ROM
Thanks a lot for any thoughts you might have.
--Ware
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