<div dir="ltr">This is a joke, right? You want someone to host your system, which, by design, will not be rack-mountable, and would be large, due to the amount of disks you are to place there. It is possible, but extremely expensive to host a non-1-U server nowadays. Who would "give" it to you?<div>
<br></div><div>An industrial-grade, 2U system could host, today, about 6 3.5" SATA disks. A 3 U can do much more, with up to 12-14 disks, depending on the system. </div><div><br></div><div>And RAM is extremely important. Since you will not invest in an industial-class RAID controller (3ware, LSI-Logic, Adaptec, Intel, etc) which will cost several hundreds of dollars, as I see it, you would want to compensate for the high write latency with a large amount of RAM and fully buffered writes (not secure, but good enough). Especially with 7200RPM SATA drives with low seek speed.</div>
<div>NFS shares, in "async" mode would give great performance, provided you give the system enough RAM. Then your RAM will actually become the disk write cache.</div><div><br></div><div>Ez<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
2010/9/9 Hetz Ben Hamo <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:hetzbh@gmail.com">hetzbh@gmail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;border-right:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;padding-right:1ex">
<div dir="rtl"><div dir="ltr">Hi,<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2010/9/9 geoffrey mendelson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:geoffreymendelson@gmail.com" target="_blank">geoffreymendelson@gmail.com</a>></span><div class="im">
<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div><br>
On Sep 9, 2010, at 6:35 PM, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
I'm planning to add some big storage solution to my VPS business. I did some checking and calculated the costs, and figured out that if I want to have a decent 12TB solution NAS box, it would be best if I would roll my own. (12 TB before all the RAID stuff, after that it would lot less). All other solutions are very expensive (example: IBM EXP 3000 costs here 6K nis without a single hard disk).<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
The question you should be asking yourself, IMHO, is what can I buy that will be as reliable as a commerical, "industrial grade" server?</blockquote><div><br></div></div><div>Not looking for industrial grade one.</div>
<div class="im">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I'm planning to use hardware based RAID card, minimal Linux distribution and have some offers like iSCSI, NFS, CIFS - the usual suspects.<br>
<br>
My question is: since I'll use hardware RAID card, which processor and how much RAM should I put in such a machine? Xeon is overkill IIRC.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
For example, a system which costs under 900 NIS would do the job. You can get them from Ivory or KSP. They have a dual core ATOM processor,<br>
one PCI slot and one DDR2 memory slot. The power supply is not very big, but it will power a bunch of 5400 rpm "green" disks.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div></div><div>This storage will be mainly used for backups. If someone wants to do a colocation to my rack, I want to give him a bonus, something that you can't find today with my competitors: I want to give him 50-100GB for storage. You'll get an NFS/CIFS/iSCSI and you mount it to your machine and use it for your backup/rsync/whatever. By comparison, when you colocate a server to Netvision's farm, you get ... 5GB backup space.. yippee..</div>
<div class="im">
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">How well will it work? How long will it last? Will it be fast enough?<br></blockquote><div><br></div></div>
<div>
"Fast" doesn't matter much when you're doing backups or storing some temporary stuff, does it really matter when it take 20 seconds instead of 10 when you're doing rsync? I don't think so..</div>
<div class="im">
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
And the "killer" question, how much will it cost to replace, in the value of downtime, your time to replace it, bad will among your customers, etc?<br>
</blockquote></div><div>Really depends. I'm not planning to fully use all the disks, some will be disconnected or out of the RAID, perhaps I'll put a redundant PSU.</div><div><br></div><font color="#888888"><div>
Hetz</div></font><div class="im"><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Geoff.<br><font color="#888888">
<br>
-- <br>
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM<br>
To help restaurants, as part of the "stimulus package", everyone must order dessert. As part of the socialized health plan, you are forbidden to eat it. :-)<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
</font></blockquote></div></div></div><br clear="all"><div class="im"><br>-- <br>my blog (hebrew): <a href="http://benhamo.org" target="_blank">http://benhamo.org</a><br>Skype: heunique<br>MSN: <a href="mailto:hetz-blog@benhamo.org" target="_blank">hetz-blog@benhamo.org</a><br>
</div></div>
<br>_______________________________________________<br>
Linux-il mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il">Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il</a><br>
<a href="http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il" target="_blank">http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il</a><br>
<br></blockquote></div><br></div></div>