Looking for suggestions / best practices

[cookiesowns]

So...

Finally bit the bullet on everything. Going forward from my previous thread here http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...-choice-for-48tb-zfs-array.21494/#post-125248

I've finally decided on the following:

CPU: E5-1620V2
MB: Supermicro X9SRH-7TF
RAM: 64GB ECC REG 1866Mhz
SSD: 2x Intel S3500 120GB for either as L2ARC or ZIL for testing / various not whats.
HDD: 24x Hitachi Deskstar NAS drives
HBA: 2x LSI 9207-8i + onboard Supermicro LSI 2308
Chassis: Supermicro SC846BA-R920B

The array setup would most likely be 4x zdevs of 6 drive Z2's for a total of 64TB RAW Usable.

The second server would be the same exact setup but with 2x zdevs of 11 Z3's with the extra 2 drives either as warm spares or for iSCSI live media use. Or potentially 3x zdevs of 8 Z2's.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a FreeNAS newbie ( I've done ZOL & large raid builds before, but that was in lab environments ) in terms of benchmarking or any configuration changes? It doesn't seem like the FreeNAS GUI supports initial creation of striped zpools off the beginning, or am I mistaken on this? Such as ARC optimization & 10GbE optimization?

And does anyone have any experiences in backing up large ZFS arrays ? Especially to tapes.

 

[cyberjock]

Here's my advice for benchmarking: Don't bother.

Here's my advice for configuration changes: Don't f*ck with it.

Not a clue what you are talking about when you say the FreeNAS GUI doesn't support initial creation of striped zpools. Still don't know what you'd want to "optimize" with regards to ARC optimization and 10GbE optimization (whatever 10GbE optimization is supposed to mean).

The advice if you are backing up to tape is pretty much "good luck". If you have a multi-TB pool backing up to tape is a "lol" moment. You really gonna try to back up 50+TB of data to tapes that do 1TB of data? Not to mention that FreeNAS has no tape support built-in, so you'll have to handle the actual process of backing up from another machine over network shares. When you have large quantities of data tapes become impractical without one of those tape libraries that handle tape rotation automatically. The best bet for us "mere mortals" that can't afford that stuff is to simply make a second FreeNAS box and do ZFS replication and call it good.

 

[cookiesowns]

Here's my advice for benchmarking: Don't bother.

Here's my advice for configuration changes: Don't f*ck with it.

Not a clue what you are talking about when you say the FreeNAS GUI doesn't support initial creation of striped zpools. Still don't know what you'd want to "optimize" with regards to ARC optimization and 10GbE optimization (whatever 10GbE optimization is supposed to mean).

The advice if you are backing up to tape is pretty much "good luck". If you have a multi-TB pool backing up to tape is a "lol" moment. You really gonna try to back up 50+TB of data to tapes that do 1TB of data? Not to mention that FreeNAS has no tape support built-in, so you'll have to handle the actual process of backing up from another machine over network shares. When you have large quantities of data tapes become impractical without one of those tape libraries that handle tape rotation automatically. The best bet for us "mere mortals" that can't afford that stuff is to simply make a second FreeNAS box and do ZFS replication and call it good.

By optimization, I mean simply making sure there's no bottlenecks and everything is as fast as it can be.

As far as tape goes, our data is pretty static, so I guess the best way is to just attach a bacula daemon to the CIFS store or just rsync to a machine and do it manually.

I suppose best way is to just handle the tape backups prior to data ingestion.. I guess, so not much I can do there.

Do you happen to know if FreeNAS has backplane support?

 

[cyberjock]

rsyncing 50TB of data is going to take days and days. rsync is not meant to be fast, it is meant to minimize network traffic.