I'm just about to put together a NAS solution for the company to replace a ridiculously overcomplicated distributed DAS system. I have the quote in for the system, but I'd love to hear any comments you have for the choice of hardware. Any comment is a good one as even if I've considered it already, it's a good sanity check.

2 Servers synced with drbd+hearbeat on Slackware 12.2 (or 13)

Each Server:

Supermicro 743TQ-R760B chassis
Supermicro X8DTi-F motherboard
Intel Xeon E5520 (x 1)
8GB RAM (4 x 2GB) MEM-DR320L-HL03-ER13
3ware 9650SE-12ML (kit)
3ware BBU-MODULE-03 battery backup

RAID 1 (Slackware OS)
WD Velociraptor 300GB HDD (x 2) WD3000HLFS

RAID 6 (NAS Store) 4x Active, 1x Hot Spare
WD RE3 1TB HDD (x 3) WD1002FBYS
Seagate 1TB HDD (x 2)

1x APC UPS capable of passing a remote shutdown request to Slack.


Server will then provide data via NFS and Samba to clients from a number of OSes.

Thoughts anyone?


Edit: I ought to say that it will be storing a really mixed bag of data from office stuff to source code and simulation data and will be providing it to at least a hundred client machines, but with load varying from barely anything to two or three clients running max available I/O for a couple of hours.

You have obviously been grokking catalogues extensively. Anyone trying to comment on this will have to do likewise. How many cores in that Xeon?

Enough

Hi,

I would spec more memory than 8GB. That board will support;

You could then setup memory for 'tmpfs' without sacrificing RAM to the system.

At the moment, I think the CPU/RAM is overspecced for what is essentially a samba server. Especially as all the RAID is handled by 3ware. Am only populating the board with one CPU and 8G RAM for now and will see how it handles. Should load become a problem, we have the flexibility to add another CPU and as much RAM as necessary.