Hi All, first time poster here. I am tasked with providing approx 100Tb of picture & video loop archive for Radiology & Cardiology systems. Commercial offerings, while robust, are expensive. Images won't get read often from this environment, so it doesn't need to be particularly fast - just have high availability.
I would like to get some advice on hardware for test & production rigs, and what I should be testing for.
Hardware
I am proposing to using 2 x Lian Li EX-503 cases (no smarts - just USB3 JBOD), with 10 x 1Tb drives, and 2 x desktop PCs with USB3 PCI cards installed.
Does anyone have any wild objections to this rig?
Config
Config needs to be flexible i.e. 1 x PC with both external cases attached to test spanning a zPool over 2 x raidsets, then each PC with 1 x external case attached to test keeping a 2nd copy of the data on a second NAS. Each external case will hold a zRaid2 or zRaid3 set.
Does anyone have any experience with setting up these kinds of test environments?
Testing & Learning
I figure the tests I need to run are (and learn as I go along);
Is this a sensible list of items to test? Have I missed anything?
Production
My thinking around the production system is;
Does anyone know of anyone running a similar setup that I could talk with?
Sorry for so many questions, but I've got a lot to learn!
Mal
I would like to get some advice on hardware for test & production rigs, and what I should be testing for.
Hardware
I am proposing to using 2 x Lian Li EX-503 cases (no smarts - just USB3 JBOD), with 10 x 1Tb drives, and 2 x desktop PCs with USB3 PCI cards installed.
Does anyone have any wild objections to this rig?
Config
Config needs to be flexible i.e. 1 x PC with both external cases attached to test spanning a zPool over 2 x raidsets, then each PC with 1 x external case attached to test keeping a 2nd copy of the data on a second NAS. Each external case will hold a zRaid2 or zRaid3 set.
Does anyone have any experience with setting up these kinds of test environments?
Testing & Learning
I figure the tests I need to run are (and learn as I go along);
- Learn the install process, including attaching and configuring multiple raidsets and zPools
- Test whether a VM or 'native' install works best
- Learn how to add/remove devices from the raidsets (won't be able to test this in 'production'!)
- Fill the disk to capacity (probably just use a script to rename a large file and write to the NAS)
- Pull disks - just to see what happens. Replace with a blank disk to rebuild the raidset
- Use of snapshots for backup / restore - across the two physical environments
- Test deduplication
- Test keeping multiple copies on one NAS - see if that 'mirrors' across to the second machine
- Performance tests - any suggestions on tools would be most helpful.
Is this a sensible list of items to test? Have I missed anything?
Production
My thinking around the production system is;
- 1u 2 x ssd, big RAM system as the 'head' unit
- At least 1 24-bay 'shelf' of disk, attached via USB3, with 3Tb drives. Probably configured as 4 raidsets (6 disks each)
- Additional shelves of disk as required - daisychained up to infinity!
- All of this duplicated in a second data centre, with either snapshot copies (15min) or mirror on write.
Does anyone know of anyone running a similar setup that I could talk with?
Sorry for so many questions, but I've got a lot to learn!
Mal