TrueNAS - ECC Ram

[Guirodio]

Hi there, i'm building a Nextcloud server for my office, and was researching prices to build a machine to be my server.

I'm going with a TrueNAS mirrored installation on 2 NVMe drives, and a RAIDZ-1 with 3x4TB IronWolf.

I'm new to this kind of thing and got myself a bunch of questions that maybe someone can help my about:

1 - How important REALLY is ECC Ram on a TrueNAS ZFS Server? Here in Brazil, ECC Ram pricing is not good, and very hard to find in a reputable store brand new.

If it is very important and all, I may go with a Ryzen 4750G, the only processor that I can find cheap and have ECC support.

If not i'm going with something cheaper, like a I7-11700 and 4x8GB 3200MHz RAM

Any advice?

Thanks

[Electronics Wizardy]

For a office, Id get a premade server. It almost never makes sense to make a diy server for a office.

 

Id get something like the dell t140 here. It will be more than plenty for these uses. 

 

The 4750g is pretty overkill here for a basic nas, Id get something like a celeron or pentium. THose also have ecc support.

[Guirodio]

I will be looking at 80~120 clients acessing my server, and I think i will use it for one more project, that will use 4~6 chrome tabs for an automatic download of reports and data.

that's why I went with powerful processors and plenty of RAM in my budget.

Dell T140 has a pretty similar price to what I thought, but it limits the quantity of drives by 4x

and has no NVMe capabilities, to my mirrored boot drives.

If i go like a step up, and a server with a little better specs, the price is just ludicrous, 3 times more expensive, and it becomes unpractical

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, Guirodio said:

I will be looking at 80~120 clients acessing my server, and I think i will use it for one more project, that will use 4~6 chrome tabs for an automatic download of reports and data.

that's why I went with powerful processors and plenty of RAM in my budget.

Dell T140 has a pretty similar price to what I thought, but it limits the quantity of drives by 4x

and has no NVMe capabilities, to my mirrored boot drives.

If i go like a step up, and a server with a little better specs, the price is just ludicrous, 3 times more expensive, and it becomes unpractical

 

You really won't need that much cpu power, even with that client count. You will hit network or disk io limits well before cpu limits here.

 

Id really go with the dell for better support, and things like the drac for management. 

 

Id also look at getting a IT person/ firm? You want to do a setup like this right, as a failure or issues won't be cheap to fix.

 

Have you looked at cloud options too? They make a lot of sense for a lot of use cases like this

[Guirodio]

We have a little IT team here, here in Brazil people still don't know the benefits of investing in something more powerful and capable, they just want to make it done, each penny matters "the firm makes roughly 200M gross revenue a year, but yeah, let's cut costs and cut more costs in IT"

I'm thinking upgradability, and not being stuck to a manufacturer like Dell or HP for parts, they are SO expensive here.

Cloud options are too expensive, we already use one, but definitely out of budget.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, Guirodio said:

We have a little IT team here, here in Brazil people still don't know the benefits of investing in something more powerful and capable, they just want to make it done, each penny matters "the firm makes roughly 200M gross revenue a year, but yeah, let's cut costs and cut more costs in IT"

I'm thinking upgradability, and not being stuck to a manufacturer like Dell or HP for parts, they are SO expensive here.

Cloud options are too expensive, we already use one, but definitely out of budget.

Id really suggest the dell server here, they turn out to be a much better option normally. How much do you need to upgrade? How much more storage do you need every year?

 

I think yoru going way overkill on CPU here, and yoru main limit will be network speed + disk io. 

 

What are these clients doing? Is this mostly stuff like word docs? What network speed do you have?

[jde3]

Few notes here:

 

1. I wouldn't use TrueNAS as a application server in a work environment. It's a NAS, if you do use it at all, use it as a NAS and nothing else. (Good storage is boring storage. It stores stuff that is all it does.) I would recommend FreeBSD as it has far more flexibility than a purpose built NAS and can do both storage and / or applications. You will however need a sysadmin to create this solution for you. -- If you are looking for a friendly easy to use server well.. remember sysadmins get paid for a reason. IT is hard.

 

2. "There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM." - Matthew Ahrens co-creator of ZFS.

 

3. Nextcloud is very good. +1

Do you need ECC? To answer that question it depends how important your data is to you. You have to judge the risk here, other people just can't tell you how important your data is.. it may work just fine without it, but there is a small risk here.

My advice? Do it right and it will last a long time for your company.

[Guirodio]

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id really suggest the dell server here, they turn out to be a much better option normally. How much do you need to upgrade? How much more storage do you need every year?

 

I think yoru going way overkill on CPU here, and yoru main limit will be network speed + disk io. 

 

What are these clients doing? Is this mostly stuff like word docs? What network speed do you have?

I maybe looking at 200~500GB a year of data, we have security technicians that store trainings in video, it can scale up very quickly.

Network is a fiber 250Mb dedicated link

Yes, mostly docs, and spreadsheets, etc.

[Guirodio]

1 hour ago, jde3 said:

Few notes here:

 

1. I wouldn't use TrueNAS as a application server in a work environment. It's a NAS, if you do use it at all, use it as a NAS and nothing else. (Good storage is boring storage. It stores stuff that is all it does.) I would recommend FreeBSD as it has far more flexibility than a purpose built NAS and can do both storage and / or applications. You will however need a sysadmin to create this solution for you. -- If you are looking for a friendly easy to use server well.. remember sysadmins get paid for a reason. IT is hard.

 

2. "There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM." - Matthew Ahrens co-creator of ZFS.

 

3. Nextcloud is very good. +1

Do you need ECC? To answer that question it depends how important your data is to you. You have to judge the risk here, other people just can't tell you how important your data is.. it may work just fine without it, but there is a small risk here.

My advice? Do it right and it will last a long time for your company.

I thought to use the Virtualization capabilities of TrueNAS, even if it is not as good as a VMware or Proxmox, i can use it easily enough, and I think performance will not be hurt by any mean.

What really makes my mind about TrueNAS are two major pros in it

Easy ZFS management, creation, resilvering, all of it

Virtualization on top of the ZFS to create a very stable and reliable RAID/Mirrored boot system

and of course, open-source and free software.

Am I wrong or what?

Can I get away with something similiar?

[jde3]

4 hours ago, Guirodio said:

I thought to use the Virtualization capabilities of TrueNAS, even if it is not as good as a VMware or Proxmox, i can use it easily enough, and I think performance will not be hurt by any mean.

What really makes my mind about TrueNAS are two major pros in it

Easy ZFS management, creation, resilvering, all of it

Virtualization on top of the ZFS to create a very stable and reliable RAID/Mirrored boot system

and of course, open-source and free software.

Am I wrong or what?

Can I get away with something similiar?

How large is this business? How many users? I would seek out someone to develop this for you.. but I can try to help guide you here.

FreeBSD and TrueNAS are the same operating system. The difference between them is their configuration and TrueNAS has a lot of middleware for "ease of management". That can be a good thing for a novice but also not good because when you are creating a solution the middleware will get in your way. TrueNAS is a specific design. a NAS. FreeBSD is a general purpose server OS. If you want an application server you want a general purpose OS.

"Virtualization capabilities of TrueNAS, even if it is not as good as a VMware or Proxmox" - Not sure where you get this idea. FreeBSD has a hypervisor that is very thin (bhyve) and has a lot of great uses. Also FreeBSD has a container system (jails) that are very good and applicable for a lot of use cases. In comparison for whatever product you are designing Bhyve, Jails, Docker, KVM and VMWare all have pro's and con's.  There are lots of situation you would chose one over the other in no case would I say "not as good" (Jails actually might be the very best honestly but they take a special setup/use case)

"Easy ZFS management, creation, resilvering, all of it" - TrueNAS only allows the creation of a single type of array in the GUI, however FreeBSD will allow many more types of configurations.

"Virtualization on top of the ZFS to create a very stable and reliable RAID/Mirrored boot system" - Yes, FreeBSD/TrueNAS use an excellent vdisk image system based on ZFS (zvols). It's far better than VMDK or qcow2.

"and of course, open-source and free software." - All of the software you want to use.. ZFS, FreeBSD, Nextcloud, Apache etc etc are all open source. You don't need to pay anyone to use any of it.

Again if you want it done right get a sysadmin. I've been one for about 20 years and I'd prob.. off hand say.. for a quick contract like this.. it's prob around a weeks of work at about $50/hr (honestly I can do the system in less than a day but I'll need to make sure I get all the requirements and everything correct and do documentation so that takes some time..) And no it's not an offer or anything I'm just letting you know what to expect.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, Guirodio said:

I maybe looking at 200~500GB a year of data, we have security technicians that store trainings in video, it can scale up very quickly.

Network is a fiber 250Mb dedicated link

Yes, mostly docs, and spreadsheets, etc.

Will this mostly be over the local network or wan? 

Id really suggest the dell here. 

 

You don't seem to need much upgrade room with that amount of storage, and extra 4tb would last you for the life of the system at this rate, so the 4 bays in the dell are plenty.

 

Really get a IT person/service in that knows what their doing. You don't want to mess this up, if storage goes down for 150 workers, that a lot of lost money. Its worth spending$10k to do it right the first time. Or just use cloud storage so you don't have to manage hardware?

 

Whats the backup plan? What if the server fails and all the disks can't have there data retrived?