Hi,
I am setting up a NAS for a startup that is doing custom chip designs. There are other uses for the NAS as well, but everything centers around the design engineers trying to get the first product out the door.
I have done several FreeNAS setups in noncritical situation using whatever iron I can get my hands on, but this one is different. I can't say money is no object, but spending money on a 3% gain is quite worthwhile for this group. So a combination of performance, reliability and protection is required. There are a number of areas where I would love to get input from the forum, plus anythign else that you see about the system.
For me, I don't ever want the engineers to say "I would have done better but the IT system held me back." Let them blame it on the sucky CAE tools, bad management or whatever...
I am looking at a RAID 10 main work pool and a raidz2 second pool. I am upgrading the key systems to 10Gb ethernet to remove problems there. I have also made some design changes to get the NAS out of some speed critical situations so that we can make the chip design tools as fast as possible.
So now I need to come up with the hardware for this. I am looking at a case with probably at >=24 hot swap bays and redundant hot swap power supplies. Opinions welcome but these are pretty straight forward.
For the motherboard, I was thinking of a supermicro dual xeon motherboard with some form of lower end of range current generation chip and 10Ge on board. This allows me to do a quick upgrade if we start staving on processing power (but I don't expect that.) Thought on this are welcome and processors as well. For another build I am using some 2600v2 ivy bridge processors, but that seems like overkill for a NAS. I will throw at least 64GB ECC ram in. How much does the ram speed matter and how will I know it's time for more?
The biggest question comes with choosing the HBA. I obviously don't care about hardware RAID and just want the disks exposed to the OS. I also was planning on using 2 HBAs with the RAID 10 disks split between them. Which HBAs should I choose and how do I set these up?
As for disks, I was looking at the WD red or SE series disks. I was also looking at 4TB sizes. Are there any thoughts on choosing the disks or sizes based on reliability and cost performance? I just don't see the value in SAS for this, but I may be missing something.
I know that I can add a SSD or Zeus for the ZIL and SSDs for the ARCL2, but I am going to take a wait and see whether these are needed.
Finally, I couldn't fins anywhere else to ask about this, so I am tossing it out here. The discucssions of high availability FreeNAS systems have seems completely unsatisfactory (like make snapshots every 15 minutes and send/recv them with ssh.) Are there any better HA options out there?
thanks in advance
I am setting up a NAS for a startup that is doing custom chip designs. There are other uses for the NAS as well, but everything centers around the design engineers trying to get the first product out the door.
I have done several FreeNAS setups in noncritical situation using whatever iron I can get my hands on, but this one is different. I can't say money is no object, but spending money on a 3% gain is quite worthwhile for this group. So a combination of performance, reliability and protection is required. There are a number of areas where I would love to get input from the forum, plus anythign else that you see about the system.
For me, I don't ever want the engineers to say "I would have done better but the IT system held me back." Let them blame it on the sucky CAE tools, bad management or whatever...
I am looking at a RAID 10 main work pool and a raidz2 second pool. I am upgrading the key systems to 10Gb ethernet to remove problems there. I have also made some design changes to get the NAS out of some speed critical situations so that we can make the chip design tools as fast as possible.
So now I need to come up with the hardware for this. I am looking at a case with probably at >=24 hot swap bays and redundant hot swap power supplies. Opinions welcome but these are pretty straight forward.
For the motherboard, I was thinking of a supermicro dual xeon motherboard with some form of lower end of range current generation chip and 10Ge on board. This allows me to do a quick upgrade if we start staving on processing power (but I don't expect that.) Thought on this are welcome and processors as well. For another build I am using some 2600v2 ivy bridge processors, but that seems like overkill for a NAS. I will throw at least 64GB ECC ram in. How much does the ram speed matter and how will I know it's time for more?
The biggest question comes with choosing the HBA. I obviously don't care about hardware RAID and just want the disks exposed to the OS. I also was planning on using 2 HBAs with the RAID 10 disks split between them. Which HBAs should I choose and how do I set these up?
As for disks, I was looking at the WD red or SE series disks. I was also looking at 4TB sizes. Are there any thoughts on choosing the disks or sizes based on reliability and cost performance? I just don't see the value in SAS for this, but I may be missing something.
I know that I can add a SSD or Zeus for the ZIL and SSDs for the ARCL2, but I am going to take a wait and see whether these are needed.
Finally, I couldn't fins anywhere else to ask about this, so I am tossing it out here. The discucssions of high availability FreeNAS systems have seems completely unsatisfactory (like make snapshots every 15 minutes and send/recv them with ssh.) Are there any better HA options out there?
thanks in advance
