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Connecting multiple servers together?

ng150716
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Hello, I have some experience to PC building, however not much in the way of storage servers. What I would like to do is build a server with a few hard drives in it, and then connect it to my network to access from any PC. However my biggest concern is scalability for the future. Because I will be storing a wide variety of things on the server (RAW photos being among the most frequent and space consuming), I was wondering if in the future my server becomes full -- or near full -- can I build a second server and connect it to the first so that it can "pick up" where the first server left off, and have both servers act as one large storage solution? 

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Hello, I have some experience to PC building, however not much in the way of storage servers. What I would like to do is build a server with a few hard drives in it, and then connect it to my network to access from any PC. However my biggest concern is scalability for the future. Because I will be storing a wide variety of things on the server (RAW photos being among the most frequent and space consuming), I was wondering if in the future my server becomes full -- or near full -- can I build a second server and connect it to the first so that it can "pick up" where the first server left off, and have both servers act as one large storage solution? 

Why would you build a second server instead of just expanding the storage capacity of your existing server if you need more space?

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Why would you build a second server instead of just expanding the storage capacity of your existing server if you need more space?

 

Just a hypothetical:if I've used all my HDD slots, and mobo SATA ports, and the installed HDD are filled. 

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Just a hypothetical:if I've used all my HDD slots, and mobo SATA ports, and the installed HDD are filled. 

Ok, so worst case scenario. Gottcha.

I don't really have an answer for you, but ask me again in 6 mo to 1 yr, after I finish these IT courses, and I could probably tell you. Lol

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Hello, I have some experience to PC building, however not much in the way of storage servers. What I would like to do is build a server with a few hard drives in it, and then connect it to my network to access from any PC. However my biggest concern is scalability for the future. Because I will be storing a wide variety of things on the server (RAW photos being among the most frequent and space consuming), I was wondering if in the future my server becomes full -- or near full -- can I build a second server and connect it to the first so that it can "pick up" where the first server left off, and have both servers act as one large storage solution? 

 

You have two ways of doing this. Using a JBOD chassis (Basically a chassis with just a power supply powering the drives) and feeding a SAS cable out from a RAID card or HBA card to it.

 

The other way involves using a switch and the Ethernet ports. You can bind storage pools together with the appropriate settings (Windows Server makes this really easy). However, I really do recommend getting 10Gb/s Ethernet..right now my server is heavily bottled necked by the 1Gb/s port. I'm only getting 80MB/s read and write when the drives are pushing 500MB/s in my current configuration.

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Just a hypothetical:if I've used all my HDD slots, and mobo SATA ports, and the installed HDD are filled. 

 

You'd just end up with two servers/two network drives. They won't really....work with eachother necessarily without potentially spending tons on server OSs and networking equipment. (tons as in, thousands). 

 

I would instead recommend just getting a case that can hold lots of drives. Figure out the general rate at which you use space, and get enough to last a few years. If more is needed in the meantime, external RAID arrays are a good solution. 

 

Then, you'll likely just want to get new drives and/or fully new server anyway, as hard drives start to fail after 3, 4, 5 years. So, you'd replace with new drives that are likely much higher capacity anyway. 

D3SL91 | Ethan | Gaming+Work System | NAS System | Photo: Nikon D750 + D5200

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Just a hypothetical:if I've used all my HDD slots, and mobo SATA ports, and the installed HDD are filled.

I'd personally slap in a PCIe SATA card to get more hard drives hooked up to the existing server. You may also want to upgrade your PSU too to be able to handle the extra hard drives too.

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~snip~

 

Hey there ng150716,
 
If you are going for a massive NAS solution, it would really depend on the Os that you are going to use. You may be able to map the storage spaces from the first one to the second one and thus see everything in one place. You may have an application with simple folders from multiple locations. As an example, WD My Cloud application for computers and mobile devices can manage multiple WD NAS devices at the same time and thus operate with more than one without the need to switch over. :) Here's a bit more info on that: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=OOCvOV
 
Captain_WD.

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
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