CPU & RAM in a storage box

[Hetz Ben Hamo]

Hi,

2010/9/9 geoffrey mendelson <geoffreymendelson at gmail.com>

>
> On Sep 9, 2010, at 6:35 PM, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
>
>
>> 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).
>>
>>
> The question you should be asking yourself, IMHO, is what can I buy that
> will be as reliable as a commerical, "industrial grade" server?


Not looking for industrial grade one.

>
>  I'm planning to use hardware based RAID card, minimal Linux distribution
>> and have some offers like iSCSI, NFS, CIFS - the usual suspects.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> 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,
> 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.
>


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..


> How well will it work? How long will it last? Will it be fast enough?
>

"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..


> 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?
>

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.

Hetz


> Geoff.
>
> --
> Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
> 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.
> :-)
>
>
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>

-- 
my blog (hebrew): http://benhamo.org
Skype: heunique
MSN: hetz-blog at benhamo.org
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