Storage solutions 4TB+ suggestions

janesssssy

janesssssy

janesssssy

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Hi,

Hoping someone can give me a few options; Got a business running with a server 2003 domain, its a 2u server.

They need an additional 4TB of storage.
My first thought was providing an additional server with a lot of storage and just joining this to the domain. They dont even need supper fast connection to this data.

or

A storage device like a NAS or storage server. It has to be redundant also.
Any ideas?

Thanks :)
 
White box build, throw as many 1TB~ SATA drives in it as you can and a half tidy RAID card (it will be more than 30 quid).
RAID 5 (5 drives @ 1TB) for cheapness, RAID 10 (8 drives @ 1TB) for goodness.
 
Ok, my first point of advice;

a) You CANNOT have a MBR based disk that is bigger than 2TB. Therefore if you want say a 4TB raid array, you'll need to initialise the disk in windows as a GPT based disk. (GPT is compatible with windows 2003 onwards I believe). However windows cannot boot from a GPT based disk unless it's an itanium system. Therefore you'll need one disk/raid array to boot from, and a seperate disk/raid array with your 4tb data on.

Therefore if you do buy a server with disks in, please bear in mind you'll need to do something like;

- 2 x disks in Raid 1 (mirror) - MBR based disk for the server to boot from (C drive)
- 5 x 1Tb disks in Raid 5 - GPT based disk 4Tb in size as the D drive.


b) In regards to implementation, what server do they have (Dell, HP e.t.c) as you can probably buy a DAS unit to enable you to attach additional disks to the server. As an example we have a Dell Poweredge 1950 which is a 1u server, however it's connected into a 15 slot Dell MD1000 DAS unit with 8 x 1TB Near-line SAS drives. This gives us 6Tb of Raid 6 storage, and we still have another 7 slots free on the Das for further expansion.

c) In regards to raid, I would suggest Raid 6 if you're not looking for lots of IO's. When your data volumes get large (several TB's), raid 6 is recommended to avoid the scenario of a punctured stripe (can't go into that in full detail, but it's basically an unrecoverable read error on a disk on raid 5 while another disk is being rebuilt into the array causing a loss of data since you then have 2 failing disks for that block of data)
 
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Maybe I'm missing something whats wrong with having a pretty box standard box, lots of high capacity drives acting as a ZFS pool under OpenSolaris and allowing clients on the windows domain access via Samba (ish) shares
 
janesssssy said:
Good idea, anything more professional? or other options.

Thanks
Click to expand...

When you mentioned a single server setup I assumed budget mode. Go with wasc on this I would.
Although I didn't specifically mention it, ALWAYS keep system and data on separate arrays, again, like he said.
 
dangerstat said:
Maybe I'm missing something whats wrong with having a pretty box standard box, lots of high capacity drives acting as a ZFS pool under OpenSolaris and allowing clients on the windows domain access via Samba (ish) shares
Click to expand...

Thinking about doing this for a backup server :)

Although if your not happy doing this you could always get one of the Sun Open Storage (S7000 amber road range) systems. Built using standard sun servers, with opensolaris and ZFS together with a fancy GUI. Great storage system - currently running a 7110 and looking at a clustered 7410 for future expansion.
 
HP AiO1200 was built for doing this kinda thing.

We have one for storing all our junk on and it works a treat.
 
I'd go completly with what wasc has said. A SAS DAS box attached to your existing server should do the trick, have a look at a Dell MD3000. Its got connectors on the back for 4 machines to use it (if you go for the dual storage processor version) and you'll be able to have a hidious amount of storage in it, should future proof you nicly.
 
Wrongapedia said:
Both the partition length and partition start address are stored as 32-bit quantities. Because the block size is 512 bytes, this implies that neither the maximum size of a partition nor the maximum start address (both in bytes) can exceed 232 × 512 bytes, or 2 TiB. Alleviating this capacity limitation is one of the prime motivations for the development of the GUID Partition Table (GPT).
Click to expand...
 
Question - do you need all that 4TB online?

I remember when I first started having a requirement to hold 7 years of data in the end it was 3 years online and the remainder offline archived.
 
Well we are now using the Netgear Ready Nas1000 4tb. AD intergration sucks! Plus everythings takes so long copying millions of files.

Anyway, thanks for any advice.
 
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