@Pete-S said in To vSAN or not to vSAN?:

The problem the way I see it with old stuff like the OP has is while there is nothing wrong with the technology itself, everything is relatively slow with today's standard and much more complex than needed.

It's very true. And the risk today is that we are so accustomed to that complexity, that we often avoid the simple answers today.

@dyasny said in Advice On a New Setup:

@scottalanmiller said in Advice On a New Setup:

In theory they are intended for special cases like video recording.

Yup, pretty much the same thing - intended for always-on, without too much heavy IO. Frankly, I doubt there's anything significantly different under the hood there.

I've looked at the specs before and could not really find anything.

@scottalanmiller said in Battery Backup with SSD raid:

@pete-s said in Battery Backup with SSD raid:

@scottalanmiller said in Battery Backup with SSD raid:

@pete-s said in Battery Backup with SSD raid:

@scottalanmiller said in Battery Backup with SSD raid:

SSD NV protection is to allow the SSD's cache to flush safely should power be lost. RAID NV / battery protection is to allow the RAID's cache to flush safely should power be lost. Each is important on its own, neither covers for the other one.

That's technically slightly incorrect.

The non-volatile cache memory on the raid controller is to be preserve the data that has not yet been written to the drives, until power is restored again.

On the SSD the capacitors hold enough charge so that the drive can write the remaining data in the cache memory to the actual flash memory after the power is gone. The cache is DRAM so it will loose it's contents after a few seconds.

The only time details like this matter is if you remove the battery from a raid card, your data might be lost.

I'm missing how that is different than what I said. What you said is correct, but I feel like you just reworded what I said, with the added detail that the RAID card flush is not until power is restored, which one hopes is obvious.

Sorry Scott, you're right. I was just thrown off by you said "SSD NV protection" and because you worded both thing the same. Obviously both things are to protect from data loss at power failures.

OIC, you are saying that the SSD is volatile, but has a battery in most cases? makes sense.

Almost, let me explain. Below is a picture of an Samsung enterprise SSD, SM863.

The SSD controller (yellow) is the brain. The flash memory (green cross) is non-volatile so it will not suffer data loss without power. There are also more flash memory on the backside.

The cache memory however is the blue ring and it will lose it's memory as soon as the power is removed. It's the same type as the memory in your computer, DRAM. That would cause immediate data loss and that is not good and that is why enterprise drives have a lot of capacitors (red circles).

The capacitors (red) act like small rechargeable batteries. When the drive loses it's external power these small capacitors will work as a reserve power for the entire drive. The controller (yellow) knows that it has lost external power so it will quickly write the data from the cache memory (blue) to the flash memory (green) before the reserve power from the capacitors (red) are empty. That way data loss is prevented. This will only take a couple of seconds at most.

0_1538765396271_samsung_ssd.png

@larsen161 said in File Server Upgrade Options:

@scottalanmiller this would be an smb share. video content being edited by a team of editors

Seems like Gluster would be the approach to take, then.

@magicmarker said in Linux OS advice for building a SAM-SD:

@scottalanmiller Thanks for you insight Scott. You make great points. I will stick with a Fedora or Centos OS with the NFS package instead after reading your comments. That is the slap in the face I needed.

LOL. It's certainly nothing against DietPi. And if you are running ON a Raspberry Pi, I'd certainly think trying that out would make sense (where it is a production release already.) RP is a very different animal from server hardware, so different needs, different sensible tunings and so forth. For the needs of a normal RP deployment, DP sounds like a good starting point. I've not played with it, so can't endorse it, but it looks perfectly fine for that.

@shuey said in Advice on building "storage servers" with two DL380 G7 servers:

The CDW rep said:

"Is it apple to apples or did xbyte use third party memory and drives? We are dell's largest partner so it should not be a large difference if truly apples to apples."

CDW might be the largest, but they aren't known for passing along good pricing, being very honest and they only deal in new, not refurb. So it is expected that their prices will be way higher.

xByte will use non-Dell parts, but keeps them under warranty. So it remains apples to apples. CDW is just panicking because they want the sale.

@scottalanmiller Thanks for this post and answering all my questions. @travisdh1 Thanks for answering all my questions as well. Good Thread!

Virtual. And I think I mentioned that buried in one of my posts about it. Or maybe it was the other thread that this split off of.

KVM, Xen or Hyper-V all work great here. Physical wouldn't be horrible, but no need for it.

@markl said in To ZFS or not to ZFS... that is my question.:

@scottalanmiller So let's get specific, here's my next post: My Home NAS

I'm on it 🙂

@JaredBusch said in Hardware Design for SAM-DR Small Rackmount Backup Device:

@matteo-nunziati said in Hardware Design for SAM-DR Small Rackmount Backup Device:

@scottalanmiller just a question (sw not hw) why veeam rather than say.. altaro. Just curious!

There is no backup software on this device. It is a storage target. One assumes that @scottalanmiller will be using some base OS that lets you setup basically any type of connectivity.

Ok! Got it wrong! Thanks for clarifying

@DustinB3403 said in SAM-SD Hardware Server Vendors:

@scottalanmiller is there a ballpark entry price for SAM-SD hardware? Are you approving all of all the systems designed? Or did you simply license the term (like Trump) licenses his name?

Prices will be available soon. It's full support, real support unlike SMB devices. So not super cheap 🙂

@momurda

From my experience, you are correct about the fake raid terminology.

Fake RAID = is the raid you do on the chip-set level without any dedicated card doing the works, but it fools the operating system that gets installed on-top of it, and does not require any special config from the OS side. I think you can do fake raid for RAID 1 for important workstations like the HR computers for example.

Software raid = is like mdadm in Linux or Windows 10 storage spaces, it relies on the OS side for everything.

Read RAID or Hardware RAID is getting a good RAID card.

@matteo-nunziati said in Open Storage Operating Systems for SAM-SD:

what a mess...

Windows desktops are loaded with software that you are only limited as to how you can use it by EULA as well.

Looping back to this, in the past month I've worked with three different companies that all experienced significant data loss or downtime because of their choice of FreeNAS. Two suffered from not having front loaded their engineering and had an inability to support their servers during routine operations and caused major outages because of it along with significant cost for repairs, and one company that lost its data because of unnecessary bugs in the FreeNAS GUI code that would have been avoided has they been simply on FreeBSD.

Additionally this past week FreeNAS 10 "Coral" was demonstrated to be so incredibly unstable a month after being released that they had to recall the release and revert to a "beta" status indefinitely. For a trivial end user application this would be bad, for a critical storage infrastructure component on which companies need to have rock solid faith, it's unthinkable.

@scottalanmiller said in FreeNAS Gets Hit by the Jurassic Park Effect:

HCL

Yes, agreed!

@scottalanmiller said in Is this the right place to troll SAM?:

@AshleyJR said in Is this the right place to troll SAM?:

@scottalanmiller I have to say Scott I haven't seen any interesting conversations going on here yet.
You promised me arguments 😞

Sorry, what about the guy claiming that Linux is an OS?

It isn't, FFS what do I have installed?

I would recommend looking at StarWind SA for example.
That solution fits your requirements perfectly, it will also provide you with HA storage that will ensure the business continuity.
As for support, they offer a single point of contact no matter what issue you face, plus the system will be shipped to your site fully preconfigured and pretested.