[CentOS] I need storage server advice
John R Pierce
pierce at hogranch.com
Tue May 6 19:50:04 UTC 2008
Ed Morrison wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I need advice on implementing a storage server. I really do not have
> the $ to spend for a Dell iSCSI storage divice and I am thinking
> trunning CentOS 5.x with ftp or FreeNAS. Here is what I am looking at
> and concerned about.
>
> Situation:
> My current storage needs are approximately 1.5 TB annually. This will
> increase to about 3.5 TB annually over the next 5 years (rough est.).
> This box will just be a data archive and once it is full it will only
> be used very infrequently if not used at all. Files are small up to 10
> MB but numerous.
>
infrastructure to support lots of SATA drives isn't real cheap
regardless. you really don't want to just bolt a bunch of drives up
inside a jumbo desktop tower and call it a server. 5 years at that
run rate is going to be something like 12TB total storage, which using
commodity 500GB SATA drives in raid10 will take around 48 drives.
Thats a lot of SATA channels...
With that many spindles, you'll also want to allocate several hot spares.
I dislike raid5 for a number of reasons, and would recommend sticking
with mirroring, eg raid1 or raid10. You /never/ want to build a raid5
much over about 6-8 disks, or the raid rebuild times get ridiculous and
double drive failures will lose huge amounts of storage.
hey, have you considered the Sun x4500 ? its a 4U(?) dual dualcore
opteron server that comes with 48 x 500GB SATA drives. ***
> CentOS:
> Upgrading to the newer CentOS flavors. I will not have the ability to
> archive this data to tape and I am concerned about loosing the data
> when upgrading the OS. How best to handle this?
>
as others have said, as long as your critical data is on seperate file
systems, there should be no issue here.
> Storage limitation. It is my understanding that there is a 2 TB
> storage limitation with Linux (and windows) in general particularly
> for stability. I see that ReiserFS can go up to 16 TB. Is any one
> using this? If so, how has it been for you?
>
since your data is archival in nature, it really shouldn't be that hard
to manage it as multiple 2 TB chunks on seperate file systems. when
you fill 2TB, take 8 x 500GB more SATA drives, raid10 them, and mount
them as another file system, /u01, /u02, .... keep an index file
somewhere which logs which backups are where.
>
> FreeNAS
> Anyone using FreeNAS? What is your experience? How easy is it to add
> new drives and keep your data? Upgrading to newer versions?
I setup OpenFiler once, that worked quite nicely, supported NFS, SMB,
and iSCSI, and was pretty easy to use. I'd have to assume FreeNAS is
similar.
*** heresy (for this list), Solaris 10, with its ZFS file system, is
extremely good at handling very large storage configurations like this.
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