Artwork Server

[Sir SpankalotUK]

Hi all, need some advice.

Our existing W2003 R2 server (DC) is becoming old and has more of less run out of space. Biggest space hogs being the artwork store (10+ years) and Email (6+ years). So I have decided to move the artwork to a new server. I am thinking about waiting for ms server 2012 to drop so I can take advantage of the latest offering, shadow copies and previous copies (most of the desktops are w7pro with a single osx).

Since I need to keep costs down as much as possible, but I need to ensure data integrity, its a lot of artwork to store and tape backup is slowly becoming unfeasible due to the long backup times and prohibitive cost of the hardware/software.

My shopping list thus far

BitFenix Shinobi "Core" USB3.0 Gaming Case (room for 8 drives)
ASRock Z77 Fatal1ty Professional Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) (support for 8 sata drives)
Intel Core i5-3450S 2.80GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155
RAM 16GB (2 x 8GB) (not sure which ram to pick yet)
OCZ Zs Series 750W
Intel 520 Series 180gb SSD (boot, single drive, may clone to a mechanical drive for backup)
Hitachi Deskstar (2tb x 4, 3 for raid, 1 for backup-to-disk)


this is where is gets complicated, the mobo has hardware raid, and windows server presumably still offers software raid, any other raid than straight mirroring scares me that it might disappear, but I like the idea that raid 5 tends to perform better, as some artwork files are large (100mb+).

Is there much of a hit on modern day software raid vs hardware? Without a battery backed raid controller is raid 5 or 10 not feasible? Chances are it will run on a UPS. I presume raid 1 will span more than 2 disks?

Thoughts people?

 

[Sir SpankalotUK]

I understand that raid is not a backup, but if you plan a raid solution properly, hopefully the backup solution will never be required (fingers crossed).

I have looked at the Dells, the chassis don't look big enough, or won't accommodate the number of drives that I want to be able to include for future expansion.

At the moment I have about 400gigs of artwork I need to consolidate, this seems to be growing at the rate of about 3-4gigs a month, thats why I was opting for 2tb drives and why a self build seems the cheaper option.

Incidently, never bothered a support contract on any of the servers, we have. Guess I have been lucky.

I have a ultrium tape drive on the existing server, but the tapes are no longer big enough, so I have to perform partial backups each night. When you price a drive together with backup exec it near the price of the server in the first place, it's why I wanted to see what alternative might be available, like backup-to-disk (either internal or external).

So assuming I get something like a LSI raid card with say provision for 8 ports. Which raid and number of drives would people recommend?

 

[Sir SpankalotUK]

yes I was considering an esata devices for backup.

I wanted to get the 180gig ssd just in case I want to do some virtualisation on it (probably lamp). Details about the requirements for windows server 2012 are sketchy at the mo. I could opt for two ssd in raid 1. The 5 year warranty on the intel ssd is nicely reassuring though.

The old server will continue its role of DC and hosting the email (our glorious Tobit installation). 1 users email is 60+gig at the moment and its only a small office. 174gig of email for 7 users (1,715,164 files). Crazy.

Still trying to come up with a nice solution to use raid1, but KISS keeps poking me in the brain.