NAS Newbie - Need Storage Solution for Small Business

[nate12345]

Hi,
I'm looking for a storage solution for a small business.

Currently we are using the managers computer as essentially a storage server (and he uses it to do his work) and I've been assigned with the task of researching possible solutions. There are currently 4 750gb hard drives in his machine and there is no more expansion in his computer for sata drives.


What we need:

-Something that will be able to currently utilize the 750gb hard drives (all seagates 7200)
-Will allow for future expansion (an additional 4-8 750gb hard drives over the next 12-24 months).
-RAID 5
-Easy setup/maintenance. Since I've never had any experience in this, I'd prefer to make it easy and not have to hire any consultants.


What we don't need:
Blazing speed. We will be downloading the projects from the storage server to one of our workstations and then work with it from there. Currently we only have a 10/100 network, however, it would be nice to view the video stream from the storage server, but it's not a requirement and since I want to use the cheaper/bulkier sata, I'm not sure if this would ever be possible.



Background on Business:
We work with predominantly captioning video and need the storage server to storage all our projects within the past 12 months (perhaps even 24, we are planning on moving them to tape after that) and current projects.


What I've been looking at right now
Dell PoweEdge 2900 -

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=04&kc=6W300&l=en&oc=war2900&s=bsd

I notice when I configure it online that it only allows me to select 500gb hard drives? I'm assuming it accepts 750gb and it's just not an option.

Any links to additional tutorials or anything of that nature would be greatly appreciated. I've searched online and looked through dell's documentation quite a bit, but haven't found anything great just yet.

Nate

 

[clonny2]

You can look at SnapServers that have expansion capabilities such as the SnapServer520 and the new SnapServer650.

The SnapServers have integrated dual 10/100/1000GB nics so you can bond them and / or eventually upgrade to 1000GB to help with performance to stream video.

 

[markm75]

You situation is somewhat similar to mine at my business, at least with the need.

We backup on a monthly full (daily incrementals) about 800gb across 4 servers.. currently we use 1 internal drive for backup, then synch it with externals..

By the months end.. that data combined (as each backup is on each server as of now) is around 1.1TB..

So I researched this to the ends of the earth and came up with a two fold solution.. This was the cheapest, but modest solution:

I'm building a 2TB homebuilt rackmount server, similar to the one recommended by "clonny2", except that its price is much much less.. (Between $3400 and $3600 with all drives and parts).

Here is what I'm using:

Either one of these rack systems (2u):

http://www.rackmountpro.com/productpage.php?prodid=2918

http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merc...tid=233&step=4

I'm starting to lean towards the supermicro as of now, as its less priced, with no need for a riser card (with risers, it appears you can only use 3 cards, instead of 7 with the supermicro low profile)..

Both take SATAII NCQ drives.. both have SAS support for down the road (I'm not too up on SAS yet though)..

I was shooting for the Asus DSBV-D motherboard $339, though I'm not sure if it will work in the Supermicro, but I dont see why not.

The cpu will be an active cooling 2.0 Xeon Woodcrest ($384), 2GB 667MHZ memory (~$300).. I decided to go with ES (Enterprise) drives, though I'm not sure ES is needed, desktop ones would work as well.. so I'm going with 5, 400gb ES Seagate drives..

For the controller card it would either be the 3ware 9590SE-8ML (for the riser) or the 9650SE-8Lpml low profile one.

You could dumb alot of this down if you dont need this much speed, but I'm shooting for 3 year longevity.. The 2U cases allow for 8 removable drives, some even offer 12, but no CDROM/3.5" (not sure how that would work), you can also go 3u or 4u...

Let me know your thoughts, or if anyone else has any comments on this or better ideas.. feel free to chime in

 

[LeeMason]

You shouldn't have too much trouble setting this up with markm75's suggestions above. But also bear in mind backups of the data if it is business critical. This will add additional cost to the solution with tape drives and software. Alternatively you could look at disk to disk (across the network) backups and offsite replication.

We can provide these sorts of solutions if you are interested at

http://www.backupsanywhere.com.

Lee Mason
Optimal Projects Ltd

http://www.opl.co.uk

http://www.backupsanywhere.com

 

[nate12345]

Thanks Mark,
I ended up going with the 3Ware 9650SE-16ML ($900). I don't think we'll need to use 16 ports, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

For the case I just bought an extremely large atx computer case (17 slots) & a 600 watt power supply. All of rack mounted options ended up being so much more and I don't see why we'd need one for this (we're a rather small company, just have big company data needs).

I went with a Tyan server motherboard ($200), Pentium D processor, and 2 gigs of ram (combo discount I couldn't pass) and I even purchased 4 new 750 gig seagate sata2 drives (I'm wondering if I should have chosen the enterprise ones now, I didn't even know about that), and got everything for a little under $2800.

Everything has been up for about 2 weeks and running great. The only downside is the amount of time it takes to do maintenance and upgrades. I just added 1 more hd to the array and it's going to take about 72 hours to fully migrate, I'm not sure of what software I should use in 2k3 to expand the partition there (it's a GPT and the paragon software I normally use sees it as an unknown partition and that's scary to me). Any suggestions?

Nate

 

[millsra]

If you get to the point and want to look at a really good storage solution. Do a search on EMC's AX150. It gives you everything that there larger frames have to offer but on a scale that is for Small to medium businesses. You can have 750 GB to 6TB in a 2u configuration and expansion is easily done. They have set this up nicely so that from the time you open the boxes to the time you have a host connected is about 30 min including racking time. This is a nice little unit and we are about to get a bunch of them for a project we are working on. We have to have small sans all over the country and these make the most since.

 

[markm75]

nate": Have you done any backups via the network or HDD to HDD with your setup as of yet.. what is your configuration.. RAID5, OS installed?, RAID0 etc?

In my setup, which we have yet to purchase, it will be 4 or 5 drives in a RAID5 configuration, with 2003 server installed (x64 probably).. With Sisandra benchmark, I get around 96 MB/s on raid5 sataII's..

Problem: I've been testing my theory on backups on another server with similar configuration. Locally if I use NTBACKUP or Symantec 11D BackupExec.. it takes 15 hours (say 6 MB/s or maybe 380 MB/min) to backup the D drive of data (raid5) to a single volume sataII on the SAME machine.

I tried various settings, did benchmarking.. all of which show at least 39 MB/sec write rates, though if doing multiple small files, this rate does drop to say 10 MB/sec in a windows copy, whereas one big, say 10GB file it stays at 37 MB/sec.

I then used Acronis 9 to do an actual image of the 300gb data drive to the internal backup drive.. this process only took 4 hours! Same thing with ShadowProtect (on a different server, as it wont run on x64).

So, i figured, well.. I guess I wont use backupexec except to tape, once we add LTO3 to the new backup server... so I tried the Acronis solution over the gigabit ethernet (benches at 49-69 MB/sec).. similar size of 300gb, both gigabit, even jumbo frames on at 9000 on the one machine that could be set this way, both machines at auto on the detect lan speed, but registered at 1gb each..

With acronis over the LAN (which matches what will happen when we backup 700gb of full backup data each week to the pending server).. it took 9 hours at normal compression..

So at this point things have become quite frustrating. I cant figure out where the bottleneck might be on a local HDD To HDD to cause 6 MB/sec performance on many small files totaling 300gb, nor the Acronis over the lan..

I then thought I'd try ShadowProtect via the lan.. it took 8hr 48 minutes with normal compression, slightly faster than Acronis, but nowhere near the 4 hour speeds or even 5 hour speeds I expected..

So.. I'm curious if you've tried any large backups, or any via the LAN, type of rates your getting etc.

I did notice that with BackupExec, it would start at 2000 MB/min, but by the end dropeed to 380 MB/min.. ShadowProtect was reporting 27 MB/sec via LAN on last nights test at first, but obviously this dropped by the end to take 9 hours.

 

[nate12345]

I have a raid 5 and I chose this over raid6 becuase I have NEVER had a problem with seagates only WD's and Maxtors. However, I was not aware how long verification and rebuilds could take. Prior to purchasing I was thinking 12-36 hours, now it's look like 48-100 hours. The performance of the raid is of course degraded during these processes, which doesn't matter too much for me, but may for you.

I have W2K3 installed and I have only tranfered about 1.8 terabytes of data via ftp. I only have a 100mbit network and to transfer that much data took a little less than 2 days. During FTP transfer it pretty much just did 10-13MB a second for me, the bottleneck for me is the 100mbps, and all of the data is coming from 1 source in my situation. My files are generally big too, so if I was doing millions of small files doing this through ftp would have taken much longer.

I have not done any hdd to hdd stuff, but I will be more than willing to run some tests on my system (speed isn't really a huge issue for me and we only have 1 office) to see how it performs. Once this migration is complete (need another 36 hours) I'll run some stuff.

6 M/B's for local stuff? Something is definitely wrong there...

To me the factor that will effect speed the most (ignoring your current problem with speed right now) will be the maintenance that will take a LONG time to do and will most likely be happening during your data transfers. I'm assuming that if I filled up this card to 16 ports that maintenance would have to be done 24/7 since it would take a week (or maybe even a little longer) to complete.

Nate

 

[markm75]

Well from another post.. someone mentioned possible reasons why this slowdown is occuring, both locally and via the LAN:

Network Share caching glitches:

Quoting:

Keep in mind that any application that writes enormous files to a
Windows network share will experience gradual but steady performance
degredation over time. This is due to a performance bug in the
Windows itself, and has nothing to do with the application that is
writing the data. This can be easily reproduced by writing a simple
app that does nothing but constantly write a continuous stream of data
to a specified file.

The degredation will occur more slowly if the host of the share has
more memory. Also interesting (and important) is the fact that if the
app that is writing the file closes the file and then reopens a new
file, the performance will jump back up to its peak. This fact is
important because it suggests a good workaround for this issue.


If you are backing up huge (100's of GB, or even TB) sized volumes to
network shares, you should configure your backup so that it will split
the backup image into ~50GB pieces. Most backup apps support
splitting the backup image file. This way performance will stay at
reasonable levels.

This is MS's issue, and is possible related to cache pollution - polluting the
cache faster then the lazy writer will flush it. Tweaking the cache settings in
the registry (after finding the MS's KB about them) can be a good idea.

End Quote


I am going to try backing up to smaller files (50gb) per file and see how this does..if this fails I may try to track down the registry hack to fix things.. if in fact, this is the root of all problems.

 

[nate12345]

Well that is definitely good to know, thanks.

Nate