FreeNAS Solution with 10GbE

[alpenwasser]

- snip -

Yeah BSD's license is a bit more permissive. My interest in it was

primarily motivated by the history of the UNIX family of OS's, I wanted

to get to know a UNIX system that wasn't Linux, and FreeBSD was the

one which had the most info on it out there from the ones I came across

(so was easiest to look up stuff I didn't know yet).

TBH I'll probably be sticking with Arch for the foreseeable future,

it's been working great for me for the last three years, and I don't

really have the time to familiarize myself with another distro at

the moment. But thanks for the tip, I shall keep it in mind if I

ever get enough spare time (after all, it's never a bad idea to

broaden one's horizons a bit IMHO).

[Ahnzh]

-offtopic-

 

with CentOS you can take resources from Fedora/RHEL 1:1, Fedora/RHEL is both from RedHat and Fedora is just sort of a stable testing platform for bleeding edge tech. CentOS is a RHEL adaption that focusses on open source, the open source elements got taken over from RHEL and except from small differences in code (since the code that's copyright'ed got reworked to open source) it's almost the same + 5 years support on every single release

[Vitalius]

Just saying. This is a thing. TrueNAS for Business systems. Probably wouldn't meet your performance requirements (though I'm sure they could change it according to your needs), but it's definitely production ready.

[Ahnzh]

no question about that. the difference comes in Support levels, TrueNAS=FreeNAS, to get those small features that are missing in FreeNAS you just need to tinker a little bit, it's all available in the Free version though. I still prefer installing the system on a flash USB dev, it's so easy to upgrade and even in case of failure you just switch out the usb dev. For home use i would recommend NAS4Free, FreeNAS though brings so much power to those that are going to use it in a small/medium business. for larger companies i would recommend nexenta solutions or Oracle (SUN/Solaris). What makes USB solutions powerful is: you reboot it and you got a fresh system. your config is saved on another USB stick, since your booting stick is automatically in protected mode you cannot meddle with it and apps are installed with 'jails'. It's nothing with failover HDDs but recovery is SO easy. Updating is the same, plug in another USB with an updated version of FreeNAS and it's running. TrueNAS just means it's Plug'n'Play ready, certified hardware and so on, but you get the same reliability from hardware that is BSD certified. iXsystems acts as a sponsor behind it. Open source solutions, to get the money in for development, either go for Enterprise support plans, or they get a sponsor and provide a community version. FreeNAS is based on the second solution. Both are enterprise ready. And since some companies add some extra functionality in it, if you are taking a good look at the community forums you realize that almost every time there is an open source solution to get the same functionality.

 

 

I'm going to bed now, cu pals and thanks for the lively discussion

 

 

I enjoyed this evening

 

 

 

Ahnzh

 

 

/edit: I took a peek into the differences:

Hot Spare - got it running on freeNAS

Enclosure Management - I don't need that

Performance Tuning - 1. terminal 2. might be interesting when accessing to it with VMs and stuff, I'm accessing it quite straight forward.

Mirrored Boot Device - I don't want it, i prefer it the USB style

High Availability - you got the mirrored boot device, that's the high availability difference, unimportant

Professional Support - Cmon i got the forums in case something goes terribly wrong, i'm quite confident i don't need it though

Swap on Flash - Only relevant in HIGH performance Virtualization environments

Citrix Verification - VM

 

All of the things above can be achieved by using the terminal. it's a bit of tinkering but then again, everything except Hot Spare is not relevant. I won't be using it in my config though. It's for larger Companies. Everything you do in SoHo/SMB should do completely fine with the FreeNAS solution, just pay attention to get hardware that's BSD certified.

 

 

Getting late, getting drunk, if sb finds a mistake, he's allowed to keep it

[Ahnzh]

A small update, i got some information about the case, it's not large enough to hold the extended m-ITX Board so i had to switch things up a bit. Now getting the bigger brother, i guess during the build process some things will change.

 

 

I keep you up to date with everything i buy for it and put together a shopping list once I'm finished.

 

For now i got the USB drives today that the OS is going to run from. First off:

 

Kingston 32GB DataTraveler Workspace. It's an SandForce controller driven SSD in a USB stick that's Windows To Go certified, so it was created to run an OS from it.

 

 

Then i got a 32GB Kingston DataTraveler R3.0 for holding the jails and config files.

 

Ofc I ran a small test to share it with you guys.

 

First off the OS Stick:

 

 

 

I was pretty impressed. 40+MB/s to the Stick and 200 MB from it, no time to ramp up the speeds or so. 40/200 is not an average. It stayed stable through the entire time with maximum variations of half a Megabyte per second.

 

the Data Stick isn't really worth mentioning, I tested it the same way though, and it was peaking at 32MB/s writing 171MB/s reading but taking 5 seconds to reach this speeds writing. Reads were unstable at a range of 130MB/s to 170MB/s. Nothing special, it doesn't need to hold anything important though, just some small files that get loaded into the ram once at booting FreeNAS. It will serve the purpose but MY LORD, this DataTraveler Workspace is insanely fast

 

/edit: actually it's as fast as SATA DOMs in writes and you got even more performance in reads. That is really impressive

[Ahnzh]

To extend the test: i copied 13.64 Gigabyte of Pictures (larger RAW pictures, Thumbnails, JPEG, mainly very small sizes under 1 MB with a few 40MB images) to it in about 5 minutes. that's 45MB for that as well, so both large and small files are transferred at same speeds. copying the files back to the desktop takes around 65 seconds for 13.64 Gigabytes. What an awesome device!

[Ahnzh]

I got my hands on a used Xeon E3 1285L, an Asus P9D-M Board, 2x8 GB ECC RAM (so i need to add 2 more 8GB), a BeQuiet! Straight Power E9 580W with Cable Management.

 

 

Since I'm lacking ports now, I'm ordering a LSI SAS 9201-16i Host Bus Adapter. I still might run into problems of getting the iStarUSA S-919. It's hard to get here in Germany since it's BTO and there are no vendors for it in Germany but I'll find some way.

[Ahnzh]

OK i ran into problems with the case. There is no reseller in Germany for the iStarUSA S-919. Does anybody know how to get hands on it?.

[alpenwasser]

OK i ran into problems with the case. There is no reseller in Germany for the iStarUSA S-919. Does anybody know how to get hands on it?.

The only thing that comes to mind is eBay, but even if you manage to

find a seller that will ship to you, shipping cases over the Atlantic

is rather expensive (~150 USD for my Caselabs box last year from Californai

to Switzerland).

Shame I didn't know of these cases earlier, they sound very intriguing.

[IdeaStormer]

What about a local case manufacture or fabrication company that could take a schematic and build one?

[Ahnzh]

letting one build here is so expensive... you could expect something around 600€ for it. And seems that there aren't any or close to none manufacturers here and none having what i want.

[IdeaStormer]

letting one build here is so expensive... you could expect something around 600€ for it. And seems that there aren't any or close to none manufacturers here and none having what i want.

 

What about a local tech school where they need a project to build something similar? You would probably only need to buy the materials and specify the schematics and some student would build it.

 

Just looking for viable options.

[Ahnzh]

I will think of it. If somebody is able to get his hands on one of these cases, buy it, tell me and send it over ;D (PM for details in that case)

 

 

I forgot to add: the first HDDs came in today. 12x Seagate Constellation ES.3 2TB, 24TB

[Ahnzh]

OK a small update: I got pretty much all the hardware i need. Now to the most serious problem with which i could need some help. I need a case since I'm not able to get my hands on one of those iStarUSA S-919. Maybe you guys know a good storage case for: 12 3.5in Seagate Constellation ES.3 drives and 6 10k rpm 2.5in SAS drives. It's going to be a m-ATX board in it, it cannot be any wider than 21cm/8.26in. Maximum depth is 60cm/23.6in and it can be up to 50cm/19.6in high. It has to get air from the front or the bottom since both sides will be blocked by a wall to the right and a cabinet to the left with like 0.3 mm space to the sides if the case is going to be 21cm wide. It's either fully internal drives or fully external drives by using HDD hot swap cages in 8 or more 5.25in drive bays (these).
 
Any idea what to get?

 

 

/edit: plz discuss this *here* since that seems to be the more appropriate place

[Ahnzh]

I created a build log in that workbench forum. future updates will be posted there instead of this thread.

 

LINK