About

SAN is dying. NetApp is destroying its disks. Got to get another storage solution.

Frames started to put together some form of baseline design. GoogleSpreadSheet

Requirements

Usage

• /vmstore, with multiple hosts accessing VMs to allow for hosting failover
  • Varied uses! Some people using it for storage, others using it as build servers

  • Ideally we would have some sort of snapshotting on this because our VM backups are a bit "eh" if I recall correctly -- BobAdamson

  • We don't have a great deal of control over how VM users set up their swap space, which could do damage to SSD's if we're not careful. It may be worth making sure that VM storage only gets spinning disks and ram cache to avoid this problem
• /home directory storage - do we want to take /home off motsugo?
  • What are the implications of this on things like dovecot which complain loudly if home dirs are missing?
  • The storage and speed needs of /home can be measured already...but we want to be a little faster of course
  • /home is also shared with samba
• /services - already on nfs setup. Works well, but needs cleaning up. Not a heavy load as databases are stored locally on their servers. Most writes will be from webcams, and most reads are probably for web.
• /away - we want this to be pretty fast to reduce login times and make the clubroom user experience good
  • very good candidate for SSD caching

  • /away needs to have ACL support and samba (3 or 4) for windows. This means either exporting the volume to another server and then sharing it that way, or having samba on the storage server. One is easier to upgrade, but has a performance penalty, the other is harder to upgrade but is more direct. Being UCC I think we should put it on a separate server so we can break one thing without breaking another -- BobAdamson

case

2RU case means take less space. but need half height PCI(-E) cards.

Need to have redundant power supply. Need front, hot swapable hard drive bays

PCI SSD

Could use a PCI-E SSD for magic caching.

Network / Interfacing

10Gb/s Ethernet

Is kinda expensive, at least $300 Our network infrastructure doesn't support.

Multiple 1Gb/s Ethernet

Many (most?) server motherboards come with Dual Ethernet ports, some with Quad. Use multipath routing magic for extra speed.

iSCSI

Could install a iSCSI card letting, some/all of the disks be mounted as block devices, over fibre. Like the SAN. Prob not worth the effort/cost.