Semi-high end hardware set up

[micke.teeling]

Hi,
I'm looking in to buildning a new storage server for our mid size video production company and came across freeNAS that looks really nice. Just thought I'd ask you guys first to see if you think it would be a good choice for me.

Our current server is windows based and has a hardware raid 40TB volume. But when the volumes grow that big our servers have gone flakey and don't really work as good as I'd like. That lead me in to ZFS, thinking it might be a better choice for me. And freeNAS looks nice with its simplicity in the web based GUI and the power of BSD. Would it work good for this application?

For hardware I have been looking at the Supermicro SC847E16 chassis ( http://www.supermicro.nl/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E16-R1400LP.cfm ). It has space for enough disks for me, and looks nice over all. Any experience with it? Any suggestion for mobo and disk controller cards?

Thanks!
-Micke

 

[Trianian]

FreeNAS should do very well for you. SuperMicro is a very popular manufacturer among FreeNAS builders, but I cannot comment on that specific hardware.

With the correct hardware, you can very likely reach your performance target. I'd suggest reading up on ZFS, speficially on pools, for 40TB you'll want multiple pools (they can still be seen as a single volume). When researching ZFS, you'll need to decide how many discs of redundancy per pool you'd like, also research the performance hit for each level of increased redundancy.

There's a lot of excellent documentation here including a few very good video presentations, I quite liked this general overview of ZFS: https://blogs.oracle.com/video/entry/becoming_a_zfs_ninja

 

[louisk]

I would suggest you contact iX Systems if this is for work. They can provide commercial support, which comes in handy when there are problems.

We have one of these (http://www.ixsystems.com/ix/servers/intel-based-servers/4u-servers/ix-4236-orion-ii-2) at work. I haven't tried pushing past about 600MB/s.