Advice On a New Setup
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(Ab)use it while you can
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@marcinozga said in Advice On a New Setup:
I had to buy 4 drives few days ago, black friday sale, 4TB WD Red for $100 each, because all 10 of my drives are failing. That would have paid for 3 years and 4 months of G Suite, and with power cost it'd probably give me 4 years. Unfortunately I still need few TBs of local storage, but I just cannot justify the cost.
That works for one user, but for a business, it gets costly quickly. We certainly don't spend $120/year for storage for our users. We are a tiny business, but even so, we would be $2,280 per year for storage. Sure, if we used several PB of data, that would be hard to beat, but who does that?
In reality, we use under 1TB. So that cost is absurd. Even if we used a lot more, four drives of 4TB each in RAID 10 is 8TB for just $400 in drives. Add a small server to run NextCloud and maybe we spend $1,400. Let's say we go with a collocation facility to put it in. That's another $900. That's only $2,300 for the first year, and $900 for each additional year.
Over five years, we'd spend $5,900 instead of $11,400. And that's assuming we don't have any virtualization or shared computing at all, that's getting a dedicated server, dedicated drives, and dedicated colocation for that one box, and assuming we need 8TB of storage. For what we really need, we could easily make do with two 2TB drives taking that $400 cost down to just $165.
Now imagine a larger business with 40 or 80 or even 200 users. The expected per user storage needs would plummet while the cost for Google storage would continue to grow exponentially.
So it is anything but a slam dunk. For one or two users, that stuff is hard to beat. But for even a pretty small firm, it can be insanely expensive and limiting.
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@marcinozga said in Advice On a New Setup:
(Ab)use it while you can
Really just shows their other plan as being crazy. Both seem to gouge on the pricing, though.
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We just lost a customer who did a SAM-SD install a few months ago. They put in a server, I think it was about $6,000. It had over 48TB of storage on it. It's a lot of storage, but they have over 140 users.
With G Suite, it would have cost them $16,800 for that same storage per year. So in a five year window the one used in house would remain at $6,000 while the G Suite approach would balloon to $84,000. A difference of $78,000 in a real world SAM-SD scenario that we just went through.
That's not even considering that they don't have a network connection that could handle the traffic to have G Suite do the hosting. That's a separate, but very important issue. They need file transfer speeds at GigE and decently reliable. Their Internet (they are in the US) isn't very fast and definitely not stable.
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If you had 6x2TB in RAID10 that's only 6TB of actual storage. That's very modest storage requirements.
A simple RAID1 with two 12TB drives would double that. WD Ultrastar (former HGST Ultrastar) for instance.I'm sure you can find other brands of hard drives regardless of what country you are in. You just need to find the right suppliers.
You handle storage expansion by adding a new array of disks.
Regardless of what drives you want even 5400 rpm drives will saturate a gigabit link. I have used WD Red and they were fine but I would look for drives with a 5 year warranty, not 3 years as WD Red have. The price difference is not that big.
Personally I wouldn't waste money on hardware raid but you need some kind of host adapter to access the drives. Software raid is very fast and RAID1 takes no cpu to speak of. With refurbished stuff you have to take what you can find though.
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I'd also look for something newer than R510. Basically you want Ivy bridge or newer Xeon CPUs because there is a pretty big step down in power usage when Intel started with the 22nm process.
R510 and R710 are too old IMHO. R720 will work though but with the E5-2600 V2 series processor for lower power consumption.
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wow, thanks guys for your informative opinions
so
@scottalanmiller , WD Gold, OBR10 for performance, fedora (vm) with xfs maybe,@scottalanmiller @Obsolesce , ok , no RAID expansion, plan from the beginning , got it.
@marcinozga , unfortunately, like @scottalanmiller said it will be more costly than local, and the gigabit fiber is between 2 buildings , not the internet connection
@Pete-S , thanks for the 12tb suggestion, but i want performance too if i went for 10gb lan
and unfortunately, i couldn't find any 3.5 servers except these 2, r710, r510 -
@scottalanmiller said in Advice On a New Setup:
@GodfatherX64 said in Advice On a New Setup:
Keep in mind even big shops when they talk about clustering for file servers it is for failover, not load balancing.what setup do you suggest to create a failover backup cluster?
lets say i want to connect to the 2 on site servers with one connection or one path , an if one is down the second is up with the same data on it -
@GodfatherX64 said in Advice On a New Setup:
@scottalanmiller said in Advice On a New Setup:
@GodfatherX64 said in Advice On a New Setup:
Keep in mind even big shops when they talk about clustering for file servers it is for failover, not load balancing.what setup do you suggest to create a failover backup cluster?
lets say i want to connect to the 2 on site servers with one connection or one path , an if one is down the second is up with the same data on itStarwind will probably work for this, in fact I had a failover cluster at work using Starwind few years ago, it wasn't worth it. Power loss was the weak point, Starwind had to sync storage after both nodes went down, so we were talking about 3-4 hours of downtime each time power went out for long enough to drain UPSes, no generators unfortunately. We had to spend additional few thousand on bigger UPS units.
So do the math, if the server goes down, would the business lose so much money to justify buying 2nd server? And probably more equipment (UPS, etc.) You can have 4 hour onsite service, Dell I think even offers 2 hours onsite, so best case you could be up and running in 3-4 hours in case of a server failure.
If you plan on going with 10gbit network, you really should be looking at SSD disks, spinning rust will have a hard time saturating that, probably 8-10 disks at minimum.
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@GodfatherX64 said in Advice On a New Setup:
@Pete-S , thanks for the 12tb suggestion, but i want performance too if i went for 10gb lan
and unfortunately, i couldn't find any 3.5 servers except these 2, r710, r510If you're looking for servers with more 3.5" bay capability, have a look at Supermicro. They have a lot of different servers and sizes - many of them with 3.5" bays.
They also have JBOD chassis which means you can take any standard 1U/2U server, put in a raid card that has external SAS ports and hook it up to the JBOD chassis. That way you can hook up how ever many disks you want to a simple 1U server.
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@GodfatherX64
Entersource (among others) ships to many countries
https://www.enterasource.com/dell-poweredge-r720-8-port-lff-2u-rackmount-server-configure-to-order -
@GodfatherX64 said in Advice On a New Setup:
@Pete-S , thanks for the 12tb suggestion, but i want performance too if i went for 10gb lan
and unfortunately, i couldn't find any 3.5 servers except these 2, r710, r510Dell 720xd - 12x3.5
Dell 530 - 8x3.5
Dell 730 - 8x2.5
Dell 730xd - 12x3.5 + 4 non-hot swap 3.5There are plenty of other options. I would definitely check out xbyte. They might even have a precofigured 720xd "special" to your liking.
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@bnrstnr said in Advice On a New Setup:
@GodfatherX64 said in Advice On a New Setup:
@Pete-S , thanks for the 12tb suggestion, but i want performance too if i went for 10gb lan
and unfortunately, i couldn't find any 3.5 servers except these 2, r710, r510Dell 720xd - 12x3.5
Dell 530 - 8x3.5
Dell 730 - 8x2.5
Dell 730xd - 12x3.5 + 4 non-hot swap 3.5There are plenty of other options. I would definitely check out xbyte. They might even have a precofigured 720xd "special" to your liking.
xbyte normally only ships to the U.S., which @GodfatherX64 isn't in from what we can tell here.
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@GodfatherX64 said in Advice On a New Setup:
@scottalanmiller , WD Gold, OBR10 for performance, fedora (vm) with xfs maybe,
That would be your best speed and reliability, yes. And definitely XFS.
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@GodfatherX64 said in Advice On a New Setup:
what setup do you suggest to create a failover backup cluster?
lets say i want to connect to the 2 on site servers with one connection or one path , an if one is down the second is up with the same data on itIf you want a failover cluster for a file server, use Starwind and do your failover at the platform level (hypervisor), not in the VM. For other workloads, like databases, you want the application to handle it.
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@dave_c said in Advice On a New Setup:
@GodfatherX64
Entersource (among others) ships to many countries
https://www.enterasource.com/dell-poweredge-r720-8-port-lff-2u-rackmount-server-configure-to-orderxByte will ship to many countries, too. But the tariffs can be tough.
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info for all : i live in Egypt
@marcinozga , thanks for your suggestion , i'm starting to think about one big server instead of two.
@Pete-S , unfortunately, supermicro is not available here and the shipping cost for a new server is massive.
@dave_c , the cost to buy something from outside the country is tough, we cant do that right now.
@bnrstnr , the r510 is the only server i can find here with 3.5 slots, either that or older,
and we can't import from outside the country these days. -
@GodfatherX64 said in Advice On a New Setup:
@marcinozga , thanks for your suggestion , i'm starting to think about one big server instead of two.
That is nearly always the better choice. It varies by region, company, task, etc. BUT...
Generally the cost of doubling the hardware is high, while the cost of downtime is low. People perceive it the opposite, and sometimes it is, but most often it is the better business decision not to have failover. Even huge investment banks rarely do that for workloads.
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To ask the question, what qualifies as a " 'proper' storage server" to you?
Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris?
Physical or virtual (everyone here would recommend virtual).
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@scottalanmiller said in Advice On a New Setup:
@GodfatherX64 said in Advice On a New Setup:
what setup do you suggest to create a failover backup cluster?
lets say i want to connect to the 2 on site servers with one connection or one path , an if one is down the second is up with the same data on itIf you want a failover cluster for a file server, use Starwind and do your failover at the platform level (hypervisor), not in the VM. For other workloads, like databases, you want the application to handle it.
@scottalanmiller , thanks
instead of the hypervizor failover, what do you suggest for a sync service in linux to just copy the differtintals between files, what do you think about rsync, would it be adequate than the hypervisor
