Quandry about NAS direction.

[Sendarian]

Hi All,

I am looking for ideas / direction here as I am in a Quandry about what to do.

I run a home ESXi lab, with two geriatric old workstations as servers and an oldish 8 bay QNAP NAS as iSCSI storage for the VM's running a few SSD's in RAID 5. For bulk storage I have a Synology 1511+. All of this is running at 1Gb, and not quick enough for me. I want to upgrade parts of the network to 10Gb

 

So "new" kit is starting to arrive. I have a server arriving next week 128Mb E5-2660V3 and a mix of 1Gb and 10Gb NIC's. This will likely be the first of two

I have a new 16 port SFP+ switch

 

But storage is slow. I have lots and lots of disks of various sizes, but non of my storage is 10Gb capable

 

The existing servers are AMD Bulldozer, 32GB, 3.1+Ghz, 8 Core and will shortly no longer have a purpose. Its a gigabyte workstation class motherboard of some description

 

For storage I am looking for:

1. 10Gb - 2 ports

2. A fast iSCSI volume of about 1 TB, on SSD exclusively for VM's

3. Ability to reuse a whole bunch of HDD, mostly 6TB as bulk storage. Possible with some addition SSD caching - although I am dubious about its effectiveness.

4. Some form of generational backup to one of my old storage devices that gets repurposed as a backup device.

 

So my options as I see it are:

1. Spend a load of money £1600-£2000 on a relatively upmarket 12 Bay Synology. Stick a couple of SFP+ ports in it and add a few SSD's for iSCSI VM Storage, and fill the rest with bulk drives. I can then use the existing Synology, or the existing QNAP as a backup device at 1Gb (which is fine)

2. Roll my own using say FreeNAS or Windows Storage Server:

     2a - Re purpose an AMD and use as a FreeNas Server in a different case with some expansion SATA cards. Memory is NOT ECC

     2b - Get  another Xeon CPU and M/B and memory in a NAS style case and use instead of the aforementioned AMD

 

I have a bunch of assorted RAID cards (LSI and Adaptec) - but they are all old SATA 150 I think and I understand that FreeNAS really wants just normal SATA ports. I do like the synology software (and dislike the QNAP software) but if I go the synology route I am going to need two units, although one only needs to be 1Gb as it would be a dedicated backup unit. I suppose I might be able to flog my old Synologies on Ebay and recoup some of the cost.

 

Also with any solution noise will be an issue - this is in my house and there are limited places I can put this.

 

Any thoughts on which way to go, ideas, show stoppers comments / criticism.

 

Sean