Slashdot Mirror
Building a Budget Storage Server
An anonymous reader noted an article running over at Firingsquad talking about
building a budget storage server. Talks about cooling, power, RAID, expandability, etc. Good overview type article, with practical application.
In an article about building your own storage server, why are they spending so much time talking about irrelevant things like *video card's 3-d performance* (128 MB in a storage server ??), mouse and keyboard choice, and yet fail to even so much as mention (as far as I could tell) OS choice or software ?
No raid? Going to rely on the drive's MTBF? WTF. A raid controler is like 80$ MAX and one additional drive is like 250 or so. Spend the damn money. While you're at it. Invest in a tape drive. You're data is more valuable than the drives.
Yeah, if you want to build a mickey-mouse file server.
Which is what they've done. Notice they're also using it as a workstation to play games.
Since when do you need a 3ghz processor and a gig of ram let alone a GeForceFX (yes he noted it's slow, not slow enough mind you) for a fileserver?
And why is he putting a keyboard/mouse in the picture? Oh he's putting windows on it... he forgot to buy a license for that! I'm not sure I understand the comment on it not being smart to put XFS/JFS/ReiserFS/Ext3 on a firewire drive... can somebody explain why that's not smart?
$3,100 dollars is REALLY steep for a machine that shouldn't cost anything more than the drives it serves data from.
I've learned to be very skeptical of any of these articles on "budget" this or that, because they rarely are. To me, a budget server means less than $500. How about an article on how to build and configure a home network server for that price?
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
And you think you're gonna put IDE drives that aren't even in RAID in place as enterprise level storage? PFFFT!
but I admittedly went a little over the top...
- Raid rack-mount server chassis (space for 8 drives)
- 3ware RAID controller (great linux support)
- multiple 120gb drives in RAID-5
- dual-athlon MB, bunch of RAM
- CrystalFontz LCD running LCD4Linux
- Samba, Postfix, etc.
It has enough extra horsepower that I can run a counterstrike server along with providing network services, primarily huge storage, for all my other machines. It's full of high-bitrate oggs (reripped everything; it took weeks, even using Grip's auto-rip feature). Oh, let's not forget the high-quality DivX.
Apart from giving me room to grow, it's made me a huge fan of dualies. I've never worked on a machine that's as snappy and responsive.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Mac OSX.......... $129 (you DID pay for it, right?)
/system cost for the machine could have been as little as $40.
Actually, assuming they only have < 5 OSX systems in their house, they probably bought the "family pack" for $199. So the
For a supported system (good, easy software updates) and an OS that's a pleasure to use, I'd say the money was well spent.
I've got a $25000 mail server
:)
Yes, but would you want to replace that server and all the others with a budget server?
I mean, the people that bitch about the hardware is to expensive, are the ones that would not understand that you have to bring the entire server down to replace a harddrive. and who's "spare/family time" is going to be allocated for the job?
However for a near-line backup system it could work, or any other system where you can afford it to have downtime during business hours.
Besides from that, they seem to fall between 2 chairs here, whats with the geforce card for a storage server.
Well, in the specs he said he wanted it to be a workstation AND a storage server. However, he didn't want to run Linux on it because of lack of drivers (Which I presume rules out the BSDs as well.), so he'll probably end up running some form of Windows on it.
So he basically built a windows workstation with lots of disks, guess the other users on the network will learn to hate the poor man who uses it when he reboots after every change in the configuration in the server, depriving them of access to the files.
I would have gone with a dedicated server, hid it in some closet somewhere and left it alone, and bought another workstation for the money saved on the server. (Give or take a few $100.)
This is extremely poor advice to give, and I hope no one takes your word on this and jumps in the deep end. There are a host of unforeseen problems that can arise from using unmatched drives. This is not what the array manufacturers designed for, and they even warn against it in their documentation.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I have many different storage servers, at different locations. They have no clue on how to build on the cheap. They mention no Linux (or BSD) and thats just plain stupid. They put a video card in a server? WTF? You dont neeed one at all, all admin access should be with an xwindow on a main computer.
Slashdot, News for Nobody. This was the lamest article I have read in awhile.
Yes, this seems like a huge oversight to me too. Especially when comparing it to offerings from Dell and Apple, who surely include a Server OS with their hardware. It's not like you can just throw Microsoft Windows Server 2003 into the mix without affecting the budget. I know that XServe from Apple they are referring to comes with an Unlimited Client version of OS X Server. MS Windows Server 2003 is $999 for only 5 Clients, and $3999 for 25. Now compare this build it yourself to the Xserve! There reasoning for saying no to Linux was the formatting of the hard drives into any common Linux format would reduce compatibility when the drives were eventually moved into External FireWire enclosures.
I can't figure out why these guys thinkg a DVDR is a backup solution
a) Likely to fail
b) Look how much time, and how many discs it will take to back up 1TB.
The realistic backup solution for stuff like this is: stuff like this.
Back up to a set of hard drives. Seriously. The cost/MB is still the cheapest out there, and it's more flexible, and heck, way faster than tape.
Talk about working without a net. I mean, why call it a file server -- sure it will serve files...But it will not do anything about redundency or recovery. Thus it is just a Desktop with lots of standalone drive space. The whole file server moniker should be reserved for machines that not only collect and serve your data -- but also protect and back-up your data. No raid, no mirrors, no tape backups -- no nothin. And some good the 3d graphics card or MTBF will do you when one of the drives goes south taking your data with it.....(Well at least you may be able to replace it under warrenty with a new EMPTY hard drive and play a mean game of Unreal Tournament or something....:)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Man, is it the day for everyone to switch off their brains?
He said different batches and different vendors. Not different models.
Use the same model all around, but buy them from different vendors (such as CDW, NewEgg, etc.) That way the chances of having a batch failure is minimized.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
I had to replace a failed 180.4Gb drive on a 1Tb server and the replacement was exactly 180Gb. I had to back up 400+Gb of data, re-create the RAID array with 180Gb partitions and then restore. If you think backing up 60Gb is slow... ha!
Unfortunately, the 3ware utilities don't seem to allow you to specify the partition size.. they just use the whole drive. Mixing one 180Gb drive in with the 180.4Gb drives made it use 180Gb for all of them. Unfortunately that isn't very practical when you are creating a raid array on a batch of brand new drives. (You'd have to find one slightly smaller drive.)
He should have gotten a motherboard with integrated graphics, so even if he needed to attach a monitor, integrated graphics would be more than enough to handle anything.
Because if he wasn't blowing $70 on a video card, and $160 on his keyboard and mouse, he wouldn't be able to complain about how RAID would blow the budget.
His calculations for the power supply have SEVENTY WATTS budgeted for the video card, which, of course, forces him to spend $190 on the 450 watt power supply.
His motherboard has dual gigabit LAN, because "an extra NIC is essential for a server." Note, he doesn't say WHY he needs that extra gigabit NIC (fault tolerance? Performance? It looks cool?) only that he considers it "essential."
He has a hundred dollar add-on that "displays the latest stock-quotes and surf reports."
I feel dumber for having read this article.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Been using Linux SW raid in the 2.4 kernel series for a year+ now and it has worked like a champ, with both IDE and SCSI devices. All disk servers were SMP (overkill but management wanted it that way). Dunno what you screwed up.
If your criteria for an adequate disk server include either (a) high performance or (b) long-term maintainability, then you should choose SW raid.
Most HW raid systems, especially cheapo PCI cards, but even expensive Fibre Channel-SCSI3 rackmount monsters, offer either extremely primitive performance metrics or none at all. With SW raid, you normally get the full performance-monitoring and tuning capabilities of the host OS. Big win. You will also get better performance from a SW raid, given the same drive layout, and as long as you do not use the box for anything else at the same time. It should be obvious but some people don't believe this.
The other big win is more important when you spend more money than $3000 (a pittance in this market): there's no hardware manufacturer to get bought, go out of business, or change product lines. No multi-thousand-dollar support contract or custom software to configure the RAID or any of that other crap. Trust me, when your dedicated RAID box's motherboard flakes on you and you discover the manufacturer has gone out of business, you'll be cursing yourself for choosing HW raid every time you search Ebay for a replacement part.
Not to mention that commodity, general-purpose HW is always cheaper to replace, and its performance/price ratio grows much faster than special purpose HW. The HW raid system with the 200MHz i760 and 64MB RAM might have looked great in 2000 but now you're stuck with the proprietary on-disk format of an out-of-business vendor with no way out except to build a new system of the same capacity and copy everything over. (In the case of large data warehouses, "full backups" don't usually happen.)
HW raid was compelling in the past. Now, with commodity hardware so cheap, and open, stable SW raid systems floating around, you'd be a fool not to prefer them in many situations. If you want a fire-and-forget dedicated box, go for it. But be ready for the "forget" part in a year or two.
The equalizer is the cost of the drive. CD drives are dirt cheap; if you back up to hard drive, the drive is the media; but if you amortize the cost of the tape drive over, say 100 terabytes (not so unreasonable given the durability of tape drives), you bring up your cost to maybe 55 cents on the gig for tape. Granted, if you back up only 10 terabytes, it's no cheaper than hard drives.
No, the cost of the tape drive is not necessarily the equalizer. The equalizer is the cost of the operator sitting there and swapping CDs/DVDs, as opposed to getting a tape solution that can hold your typical incremental backup on a single tape, that can be dropped in at COB, and removed in the morning.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Never again. Hardware raid all the time :-)
Riiiiight, because that hardware RAID doesn't have any of that untrustworthy software in it. No bugs there. Move along.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
and the other funny part is that they talk that reliability is important and yet dismiss SCSI right away.
please find me IDE drives with a 5 year warrenty. Or server class IDE drives.
I can't. I tried. and I decided that for our "cheap" server we use U160 drives off a 29160 scsi card and use software raid 5 on a linux box running samba.
I came in less than they did, yes I have less storage but I know that my drives will still be spinning and running happily in 2007 you can't say that for today's IDE drives. I also added a DLT7 drive (anyone that spec's a server WITHOUT a backup solution is a hack.) to back things up daily.
IDE is great for consumer class stuff. I would NEVER EVER trust critical business data to any server running IDE drives and without a good backup system like a DLT drive.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They spent $300 for a Pentium-3 and $200 for a high-end motherboard and $350 for the fastest most expensive memory they could find, when a "budget server" could do just fine with a ~$100-150 2GHz CPU+motherboard and $200 for 1GB of average-speed memory. (Their motherboard does sound good, though.) After all, the bottleneck here is the disk drives and network, not the CPU, though even on a budget server it's probably worth having the 1GB of RAM for caching and for staging CD or DVD burns.
The $190 power supply seems expensive, but that may be realistic for a system that can expand to 8 drives. If you've got a UPS, you may not need as high-end a power supply, and a "budget" system might get away without it, but since they were too cheap to buy a 5th drive for RAID they're probably much more in need of highly reliable power. And their 3GHzP4 CPU and overpowered-for-a-server video card use too much power and put out too much heat - you can easily save 50-75 watts by making better choices, and probably 100. You could save even more by using a motherboard with built-in 2D video, but most of those don't have the high-performance networking support yet.
Also, they didn't have a price for an operating system :-). That means that they're planning to use Linux, which is another reason not to waste power or cooling or money on a gamerz video card...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks