Volunteer Opportunities - Large Network Storage options for members/committees/cameras/etc

Volunteer Opportunities
#1

Infrastructure will be exploring options for expanding our storage and making it more secure and resilient. With that in mind, can someone, or several someones, do some research on what is available in large capacity Network Attached Storage for reasonable pricing?

I’ve looked at BackBlaze and 45Drives, but that is a very expensive option. If anyone knows of companies that are upgrading their NAS and would be willing to donate or discount their old system, that would be a good option as well.


:warning: **NOTE**: This category is **NOT** for discussion threads. Any "discussion" will be split out by one of the TALK Moderators to create a separate "discussion thread".
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#2

Can you define what you mean by large capacity?
Do you have an IOPS in mind?
What about resiliency? Are you just thinking about cold backups, or do you want something that can do a warm/hot failover?
How will this be integrated (on-site, off-site, cloud, etc)?
What level of management/control/logging are you wanting to have?

#3

All good questions, including several that I hadn’t considered yet.

I want to have the storage local, particularly the member, committee, camera, VM backups, etc. We currently are using a CrashPlan for offsite backup of critical data.

Price will determine the total storage we get, but I don’t want to have to be buying more storage in the next two years.

I’ll be meeting with our Storage Guru, @lukeiamyourfather, sometime Wed evening to go over our current setup and you (and any interested party) are welcome to come by as well, if you wish.

#4

Please let us know the time. I put out a feeler on FB to see if any of my friends in IT know of someone upgrading storage solutions that would be amenable to a donation.

#5

The time for getting together tomorrow is up in the air… I have a server install tomorrow that could go long.

#6

I’ve actually got a previous commitment for a vendor event on Wed, but could come by on Friday.

Just to get started, can you give me an idea of the size you’re looking for? Are we talking about 10TB, 50TB, 500TB, 2,500PB? Can you ballpark it for me?

#7

A year or two ago we purchased a pair of HBA and JBOD for setting up ZFS file servers to host various things. These ended up as Windows Server installs for whatever reasons at the time and aren’t getting used much that I know of. Re-purposing those might do the trick. If we need to setup something larger I can make recommendations, I’m biased, my recommendations will be ZFS. For example…

1x http://www.wiredzone.com/supermicro-storage-servers-4u-barebone-dual-processor-ssg-6048r-e1cr36l-10024396
8x http://www.wiredzone.com/samsung-components-memory-ddr4-m393a2g40db0-cpb-32031426
2x http://www.wiredzone.com/intel-components-cpu-processors-server-bx80660e52640v4-10025962
1x http://www.wiredzone.com/supermicro-components-hard-drives-accessories-mcp-220-82609-0n-10022250
1x http://www.wiredzone.com/supermicro-components-hard-drives-accessories-mcp-220-84701-0n-10020193
2x http://www.wiredzone.com/supermicro-components-cables-sata-cables-cbl-0179l-10017673
1x http://www.wiredzone.com/supermicro-components-cables-sata-cables-cbl-0082l-10016924
2x https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1063645-REG/samsung_mz_7ke1t0bw_850_pro_1tb_2_5.html
2x https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1063643-REG/samsung_mz_7ke256bw_850_pro_256gb_2_5.html
38x https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1322879-REG/hgst_0s04005_4tb_7200_deskstar_nas_internal.html

That would give us around 100TB usable space and more IOPS than we’ll ever need. This could cover member storage, security footage, machine images, etc. The price would be around $13K which is a lot of money and I think we can probably make what we have already work for us (maybe with a few small upgrades). If we really do need more storage than what we have on hand this is how I’d go about getting it unless there’s a donation of something awesome out of the blue.

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#8

The Storage Guru has spoken. :wink:

I think ballparking 50-100TB would be an excellent start. I really need to get a handle on what we have, what we are using, and what the projected needs for future projects will be… hopefully tomorrow night will answer most of that.

#9

Absolutely excessive.
The pair of Windows servers used to have Ubuntu and ZFS running on them, but we found out that it cannot integrate with AD for file permissioning. Thus I installed Windows Server on them.

They just need to be nuked and reinstalled.

Each one has 24TB of raw storage, 48GB total.

#10

Is that 24TB raw in a RAID array, or is that just the JBOD of the total drive volumes?

How many drives and what size?

#12

12x2TB (24TB if JBOD)

#13

Just a reminder, y’all:

:warning: NOTE: This category is NOT for discussion threads. Any “discussion” will be split out by one of the TALK Moderators to create a separate “discussion thread”.


That being said, please keep discussion on track as to whether you are willing to volunteer to help research this. Any discussion about whether there should be an upgrade and/or how to best utilize current hardware needs to be taken to a discussion thread and/or off-line (_perhaps in person tonight for those of you who can meet up with Stan & Luke while they are discussing related items..._).

@StanSimmons ~ do you have a ballpark time when members can expect to meet up with you tonight if they have time to stop by? If not, please consider a quick update when you have a better idea. Thanks!

#15

I’ll be at the space most of the afternoon, but would like to carve out 7-8 for discussion in the common room, or in one of the classrooms if one is available.

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#16

Would this be for live, warm, or cold storage?

If its cold storage then AWS Glacier is a viable option while warm 90 day storage could be synced to an AWS S3 bucket.

#17

This is an old thread.

4 Likes