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.