someone1
Dabbler
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2013
- Messages
- 37
I've been thinking of a good DR solution for my company. We have a 1TB NAS running on Windows Storage Server 2008.
Here's my idea...
Overview
Utilize AWS Storage Gateway (in cache-mode) with FreeNAS sitting in front of it (connecting over iSCSI) and either use CIFS on FreeNAS or expose an iSCSI target to my Windows Server to share files between users and redirect users' home folders.
Detail
The Storage Gateway would replicate my entire storage needs to S3 which solves two things: Backups and DR. With compressed Snapshots on Amazon's side, I don't have to continue backing up the NAS server as I do now and if we ever go up in flames (which I hope will never happen) I just get a new box and connect to the storage gateway from a new location and all my data is there!
FreeNAS would help in two ways: ZFS deduplication (is this a bad idea over iSCSI?) to lower my storage cost on the AWS servers and ZIL/L2ARC SSD caches for fast read/write of my data. I'm sure a majority of our data can fit into a 256GB L2ARC SSD. FreeNAS should be able to connect TO an iSCSI target and use that as a vdev in a ZFS pool, correct? I wouldn't need any redundancy here.
I'm torn between connecting FreeNAS to my domain and using the built-in CIFS sharing method, or letting Windows handle sharing out the storage for better control over permissions and such.
The Storage Gateway and FreeNAS box would be virtualized on the same server and the optional Windows server would have a dedicate gigabit switch (with jumbo packet support) for iSCSI communication to the virtual server if I indeed go through that route. I don't think relying on hardware RAID for the virtual server should effect anything, but please correct me if I'm wrong. Or should I just passup the local storage to the FreeNAS virtual machine (using Vt-d compatible hardware) and have ESXi connect to that as a storage pool for the Storage Gateway VM (which in turn would provide the iSCSI target FreeNAS would use for a second ZFS pool that will be shared in the office)?
What do you girls/guys think? Is this setup practical? Are there any pitfalls I'm not seeing? I'd appreciate any feedback. I'd obviously do some performance testing and price projections before committing to this, but I'd like to know the idea itself is not setup to fail.
Here's my idea...
Overview
Utilize AWS Storage Gateway (in cache-mode) with FreeNAS sitting in front of it (connecting over iSCSI) and either use CIFS on FreeNAS or expose an iSCSI target to my Windows Server to share files between users and redirect users' home folders.
Detail
The Storage Gateway would replicate my entire storage needs to S3 which solves two things: Backups and DR. With compressed Snapshots on Amazon's side, I don't have to continue backing up the NAS server as I do now and if we ever go up in flames (which I hope will never happen) I just get a new box and connect to the storage gateway from a new location and all my data is there!
FreeNAS would help in two ways: ZFS deduplication (is this a bad idea over iSCSI?) to lower my storage cost on the AWS servers and ZIL/L2ARC SSD caches for fast read/write of my data. I'm sure a majority of our data can fit into a 256GB L2ARC SSD. FreeNAS should be able to connect TO an iSCSI target and use that as a vdev in a ZFS pool, correct? I wouldn't need any redundancy here.
I'm torn between connecting FreeNAS to my domain and using the built-in CIFS sharing method, or letting Windows handle sharing out the storage for better control over permissions and such.
The Storage Gateway and FreeNAS box would be virtualized on the same server and the optional Windows server would have a dedicate gigabit switch (with jumbo packet support) for iSCSI communication to the virtual server if I indeed go through that route. I don't think relying on hardware RAID for the virtual server should effect anything, but please correct me if I'm wrong. Or should I just passup the local storage to the FreeNAS virtual machine (using Vt-d compatible hardware) and have ESXi connect to that as a storage pool for the Storage Gateway VM (which in turn would provide the iSCSI target FreeNAS would use for a second ZFS pool that will be shared in the office)?
What do you girls/guys think? Is this setup practical? Are there any pitfalls I'm not seeing? I'd appreciate any feedback. I'd obviously do some performance testing and price projections before committing to this, but I'd like to know the idea itself is not setup to fail.
