Advice on building a server with great performance for Minecraft while also acting as a NAS that can store up to 30Tb of data

[robigan]

I think it's better if I provide a bit of context first so that people can have a scope as to the needs of the people. So the gaming division of the student counsil (The student counsil is made up of 26 "presidents", 2 for each school. And many more people that are interested in using the system I am going to mention) have been tasked with making a server, or a cluster depending on what works best that can run both a minecraft server (we expect ~10-30 players concurrent online, we can scale up later if need be) and host a NAS/websites for each school/president, the NAS has been estimated to at least be able to provide 30Tb of space at launch. And our budget is 1000 euro.

 

TL:DR Sorry if I am not clear but essentially we need to setup a server that can run a minecraft server great and host at least 30Tb of data in a budget of 1000 euro.

And my question is what would be the way to go. Because originally we wanted to go with a ryzen 5 5600x due to it's single core performance stats on sites like geekbench and has a good price. Although after hearing that we needed also 30Tb of minimum storage we thought that a 5600x wouldn't be cut out for the job because if we wanted to go with something like RAID, it would suffer under managing 30Tb of data, especially since it only has 6 cores. So we then decided that with our budget it was best to get a refurbished nas server with loads of space and build a separate mc server and then cluster that in something like VMWare. But we aren't all too sure as to what would be the best way to go, so we wanted to hear the opinion of the internet. Also it's most likely these servers will be in a company that provides hosting your own DIY servers within their data centers.

[FloRolf]

To get this straight: Is the 30TB of storage included in the price? Because a 10TB drive is like 450€ alone and then you'd want some redundancy as well so you better get 4 or 5 drives instead of just 30TB. 

[tkitch]

First off, I Think your price is beyond optimistic.  You're looking for a LOT of HDD storage and not wanting to spend much $ To get there.

 

Anyways:

 

Minecraft Server.  Easy, they don't take much to run.  Anything decent will do fine.

 

30TB of data....  Elaborate, a lot.

 

What's the data being used for?  What's the general kind of data?  is the host server processing the data?  

 

IE:  Hosting a huge SQL database?  Hosting Video Files and then streaming via plex?  JPEG files?   Millions of tiny files that will have tons of random seeking happening?

 

30TB of data isn't always 30TB of data, there's a LOT of differences depending on usage.

[PorkishPig]

35 minutes ago, robigan said:

And our budget is 1000 euro.

Unless you're buying used drives, this budget is unrealistic.

35 minutes ago, robigan said:

it would suffer under managing 30Tb of data, especially since it only has 6 cores

I'm not sure why you think this would be a problem. I use an old ~2012 LaCie NAS with a ARM processor, which has a 24TB RAID10 array that receives constant writes from two servers and three security cameras. Works just fine.

35 minutes ago, robigan said:

So we then decided that with our budget it was best to get a refurbished nas server with loads of space and build a separate mc server and then cluster that in something like VMWare.

I'd say use TrueNAS Scale to take advantage of ZFS and Kubernetes + Docker for running the Minecraft servers. Alternatively, you can go with TrueNAS Core with MineOS jails, though FreeBSD can be a bit of a learning curve if you're used to something like Ubuntu.

[robigan]

1 hour ago, FloRolf said:

To get this straight: Is the 30TB of storage included in the price? Because a 10TB drive is like 450€ alone and then you'd want some redundancy as well so you better get 4 or 5 drives instead of just 30TB. 

Yea, the 30Tb will be covered by the 1k euro budget. Or whatever budget we should have lol

50 minutes ago, tkitch said:

First off, I Think your price is beyond optimistic.  You're looking for a LOT of HDD storage and not wanting to spend much $ To get there.

 

Anyways:

 

Minecraft Server.  Easy, they don't take much to run.  Anything decent will do fine.

 

30TB of data....  Elaborate, a lot.

 

What's the data being used for?  What's the general kind of data?  is the host server processing the data?  

 

IE:  Hosting a huge SQL database?  Hosting Video Files and then streaming via plex?  JPEG files?   Millions of tiny files that will have tons of random seeking happening?

 

30TB of data isn't always 30TB of data, there's a LOT of differences depending on usage.

The fact is, I am not quite sure how the data is gonna be used. All ik is that as of now, at launch, some schools are interested as using it as a system to host files from past documents. And they want to host websites, probably in a docker container setup.

Quote

Millions of tiny files that will have tons of random seeking happening?

Yea probably that's gonna be one of the biggest use cases, as an example, they may use it to host documents/agreements between companies and the company their working with may also need to access these files.

 

And I have to be honest here, y'all are quite correct that the budget isn't enough as is so yea.

 

51 minutes ago, PorkishPig said:

I'm not sure why you think this would be a problem. I use an old ~2012 LaCie NAS with a ARM processor, which has a 24TB RAID10 array that receives constant writes from two servers and three security cameras. Works just fine.

Huh, I guess I should look more into that topic

[tkitch]

Well, use case and how it's dealing with data will determine your CPU needs.

 

You're probably better off with 2 boxes.  A Dedicated Minecraft server (Easily under 200$) and then a storage server.  

[robigan]

Ok so I just talked to the Heads of the Gaming division of the student counsil. So let me explain, each school/presidency will be paying an annual fee for use (So electricity, network ingress/egress). On top of that, they get 500Gb free but then for additional they pay for the storage they request, not use, request. It's most likely that as a better option we'll start out with 15Tb just before school ends. And at the start of the school year, or whenever they'll pay the service fee we'll go ahead and upgrade their allocated storage.

[robigan]

Just now, tkitch said:

Well, use case and how it's dealing with data will determine your CPU needs.

 

You're probably better off with 2 boxes.  A Dedicated Minecraft server (Easily under 200$) and then a storage server.  

Yea true

[tkitch]

For a minecraft server, a used HP Business i5 6600 can be had for well under 200 bucks.  Give it 16GB RAM (8GB is probably fine for base) and a decent SSD, and you're up and running.

 

It's a solid CPU with a very solid clock speed, that should be more than enough for any (non-crazy-modded) server.

[robigan]

Just now, tkitch said:

For a minecraft server, a used HP Business i5 6600 can be had for well under 200 bucks.  Give it 16GB RAM (8GB is probably fine for base) and a decent SSD, and you're up and running.

 

It's a solid CPU with a very solid clock speed, that should be more than enough for any (non-crazy-modded) server.

Well we aren't quite sure yet as to what the mc server will be used for as the people want different things from the mc server (Like SMP, maybe factions?, or minigames) but thanks for the suggestion