Just spit-balling here....

RojoLoco

@Dashrender Sorry the SMB Business article is quite long, can you give me the summation? (I'm reading it now)

@RojoLoco Why would a Non-Profit has lots of spare equipment lying around to do this with?

Strictly a hypothetical that might explain why. Might be a small biz with a "frugal" owner who won't buy anything new and expects IT to cobble together working solutions out of garbage (non hypothetical, that was an old job I had). My current company feels that data is worth the investment in a turn-key system, but I've worked places where management would have balked at new SAS drives for a homebrew NAS.

Dashrender

@dafyre
From memory, and it's been a few years, Scott always seemed to really want Tier 1 if possible, but if you had to be budget friendly, then yes, Tier 2 like SuperMicro was definitely usable.

Using a white box as @DustinB3403 suggests to me indicates that you don't value your data. The cost of the hardware for a Teir 1/2 NAS should be significantly lower than the value of your data, unless you just don't care about your data.

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said:

Would anyone really consider building a home-brew NAS for backing up their Business infrastructure?

And I'm not saying going home-brewed to be cheap, just to avoid the name brands. All highly rated server equipment parts and raid controllers with SAS drives (for "cheap" storage).

Buy an Intel Board and Xeon processor
Intel RAID controller
Intel Drives

The whole 9.

Or am I just insane?

I'm not sure what you are saying. Are you trying to say you want a SAM-SD or a cheap, crappy whitebox? You mention Intel, who has a terrible reputation and I would never use their boards and definitely never their RAID controllers (some of the worst in the industry) so I'm guessing the latter. So no, I would never use that for anything, ever.

Avoiding the "big names" is another way to say "avoiding quality." If you are not trying to be super cheap, why else would you opt for super low quality parts?

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said:

Isn't that the basis of a SAM-SD? Though the SAM-SD would be based on first tier hardware like HP or Dell.

Right, the SAM-SD concept is to be fully enterprise, never whitebox.

DustinB3403

I've generally respected Intels product lines and never had any issues with them in the past.

So being Part Agnostic then the Topic will be revised.

scottalanmiller

@dafyre said:

I think @scottalanmiller recommends using companies like SuperMicro for their servers and as @DustinB3403 mentioned, using business quality drives... Sounds like the basis of a SAM-SD to me too, lol.

Definitely. SuperMicro, Dell and HP are the top choices for a SAM-SD. The original SAM-SD, the Model 0 if you will, was based on the HP Proliant DL585 G2. The first "home" built one was an HP DL185 G5. The most common recommended platform is a Dell R720xd (hit up xByte to get a good price on one.) If you want something huge or unique then SuperMicro is always always the best way to go. But make sure you are getting LSI or Adaptec controllers if you don't go OS software RAID or you will be sorry.

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said:

@dafyre
From memory, and it's been a few years, Scott always seemed to really want Tier 1 if possible, but if you had to be budget friendly, then yes, Tier 2 like SuperMicro was definitely usable.

Using a white box as @DustinB3403 suggests to me indicates that you don't value your data. The cost of the hardware for a Teir 1/2 NAS should be significantly lower than the value of your data, unless you just don't care about your data.

You nailed it. Tier 1 and Tier 2 only. Going with low quality parts saves almost zero money but creates a lot of risk both in failure and compatibility not to mention performance and an inability to get support.

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said:

I've generally respected Intels product lines and never had any issues with them in the past.

So being Part Agnostic then the Topic will be revised.

Intel makes middle of the road processors (nothing compared to IBM Power or Oracle Sparc) and quite good SSDs and some excellent support chipsets but their quality pretty much ends there. Their motherboards are generic and their RAID cards are literally the example of customers being tricked to get FakeRAID, nearly all Intel RAID products are FakeRAID and some of the worst in that category.

scottalanmiller

Moving to big name ENTERPRISE parts turns this into a SAM-SD discussion and, yes, I recommend that heavily.

scottalanmiller

As does the Oracle ZFS team who worked with Eric McAlvin and I to develop the SAM-SD model in 2007.

scottalanmiller

The SAM-SD approach was based on the work that Sun (now Oracle) did on Thumper.

scottalanmiller

Sun Thumper.... the predecessor to the SAM-SD

thumper

scottalanmiller

The HP Proliant DL585 G2, the first machine that McAlvin and I designed to take on NetApp in a 10,000 node compute cluster for NFS performance in 2007. Used RHEL 5 and NFS 3. Crushed a half million dollar NetApp tuned by the NetApp team directly for the test. This is the SAM-SD 0, it wasn't called a SAM-SD until years later.

hp proliant dl585 g2

dafyre

@scottalanmiller It was somebody at SW that gave it that name, isn't it?

DustinB3403

OK so Scott for the purpose of this topic, what hardware vendors meet your Criteria for ENTERPRISE grade equipment that business might build in house?

IBM Power / Oracle Sparc
Supermicro / Dell / HP
LSI or Adaptec

Any others?

scottalanmiller

@dafyre said:

@scottalanmiller It was somebody at SW that gave it that name, isn't it?

Yes "Limey", Marin Peverly from PA.

scottalanmiller

The original Reference Design SAM-SD "Model 1" from 2009. The HP Proliant DL185 G5. 14x 3.5" LDD HDs, dual AMD Opterons, SmartArray P400 512MB RAID Controller.

hp proliant dl185 g5

@ntg still has the original unit.

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said:

OK so Scott for the purpose of this topic, what hardware vendors meet your Criteria for ENTERPRISE grade equipment that business might build in house?

IBM Power / Oracle Sparc
Supermicro / Dell / HP
LSI or Adaptec

Any others?

While I'm not fan, Cisco would make the list as well. As would Fujitsu.

dafyre

@scottalanmiller ROFL... If I didn't know better, my first guess would be that is the same model used in the HP / LeftHand P4300 SAN series...

scottalanmiller

@dafyre said:

@scottalanmiller ROFL... If I didn't know better, my first guess would be that is the same model used in the HP / LeftHand P4300 SAN series...

It is, we've often mentioned that the Lefthand was HP's response to the SAM-SD reference design. They actually took the parts and design that we had been promoting and built a fully supported proprietary product based on the open design that we had done.