this is a video I've been meaning to make for quite some time because I've
been meaning to practice what I preach
for quite some time and that is to always have a backup of your data
preferably one that is offsite which is easier to say than to do I mean if
you've just got a few smartphone pictures you can use a cloud account or
even burn a couple discs once a quarter to act as your Disaster Recovery storage
solution but if you're talking about dozens of terabytes worth of video and
we're talking video that could be needed at any given moment for smooth business
operation you better have something a little beefier so meet Cam Loop
server whether you run a small business or A1 billion Enterprise Rackspace has
your dedicated storage environments covered check out the link in the video
description to learn more so this project starts
actually with undoing most of what I had
planned from before I had intended to use the same Norco RPC 4224 case from
the high-speed SSD server which can handle 24 drives on sleds with a SATA or
SAS compatible back plane thing but iar
USA reached out and showed me this the ex 4M 36- exp and my plan plans changed
somewhat at that time so at the front of this case you'll find a 24 hot swappable
hard drive caddies that work with 3 and 1/2 or 2 and 1/2 in drives some sick ass
beefy 120 mm cooling fans and this SAS
back plane that connects on the inside with the usual Molex power connectors
and sff 887 SAS connectors with the
difference and this is cool being that it doesn't actually require six SAS
connectors for all those 24 drives you can even use just one if you want and
the back plane handles routing that traffic to all the connected drives now
obviously with just that one connector
you won't necessarily be able to run all of those bays at the same speed as if
they were individually plugged in but for an off-site backup server will where
we'll never do more than gigabit speed to the whole box this is way more than
enough but hold on a second Linus since
when is more than enough enough I
thought this was Linus Tech tips why aren't you sticking with the Norco case
that drives every single connected Drive individually at full speed great
question and we can answer it by going around the back of the ex 4M 36 ESP yes
friends that is another 12 drives back
there giving us a total of 36 drives of expansion that thanks to
the built-in SAS expander boards can be driven off of just two SF 887 ports
absolutely perfect for an unraid
deployment which doesn't mean that there aren't any compromises that were making
with a configuration like this I mean I get effectively only a 2u height
enclosure inside my 4u case to install
all the rest of my internal components so let's meet those internal components
shall we first is our motherboard a z9p u8 server board from ASUS with a couple
of features that make it ideal for this build number one is the ipmi intelligent
platform management interface module that we've added to it when you can't
have physical access to a server because it's a 6-hour drive away one of these is
critical because it allows you to perform low-level functions through a
dedicated special Ethernet port on the back that normally couldn't be done
through conventional Network control Solutions like team viewer or remote
desktop connection things like altering bio settings or hard resetting the
machine number two is that it's
compatible with some Hardware that we had lying around like these 46 gig ECC
DDR3 Kingston RAM modules that I've actually had kicking about the office
since uh course Kingston sponsorship deal for that whole room water cooling
project over a year ago and this Zeon e
5 2620 V26 core that I pulled out of our
storinator server when I needed a higher clocked CPU to overcome some SMB
bottlenecking so I could have tried to Source a better CPU in this case because
while 64 GB does give me the option to
run some VMS I suspect this machine
won't do much more than store files so I kept things pretty light for cooling I
obviously couldn't stick with my go-to server heat sink the noct to any
d9l because of the limited height that I had to work with so I opted for an
nhl12 with the top 120mm fan removed and
since this is only an 80 wat TDP chip with ample case air flow it's not really
a concern to just have that bottom fan on there next is our HBA card and I've
actually been using raid cards uh many of which I had lying around already so
it wasn't a matter of extra cost for HBA
or host bus adapter Duty but what I found out relatively recently
is that even ones with good jbod mode so
that's just kind of like an HBA mode where you just connect drives and they show up to Windows like they're just a
drive no raid they don't behave completely transparently which can
interfere with operating systems like freas and unraid getting proper smart
data readings from the drives so I'm actually using an LSI 9300 8i HBA so it
has zero raid capabilities whatsoever
then I've got a couple of mini SAS HD connectors that I can use adapter cables
to plug into my back planes leading us finally to hard drives yes my friends
the 8 tbte Seagate Enterprise capacity drives are making yet another appearance
here in all of their Glory these are only SATA drives but for our workload it
really won't make any difference and SAS controllers are compatible with SATA
drives just not the other way around which you can learn more about here so
these are true Enterprise grade drives not the shingled archival ones and
they're capable of their full read and right speed so somewhere in the
neighborhood of 230 to 240 megabytes per
second According to some right speed testing that we did when you're just
hitting one drive at a time freaking awesome they also offer excellent
resistance to vibrations from nearby machines a must for data center
deployment and a massive 2 million hour meantime between failure rating with all
of them installed then so we actually had only 23 left after the ones we've
deployed already all that's left to find out is how much performance we can get
with so many drives hooked up to a single connector and actually that is
looking pretty darn good thanks to the 12 gbit per second SAS controller we're
using and the rated internal bandwidth of about 2.4 GB per second for that SAS
back plane at the front we could write to our array of 22 discs at about 2 gab
per second more more than we'll need even if we upgraded to 10 GB internet
since this server will be off site freaking
Ballin speaking of Ballin were you thinking you might want a solution
that's a little bit less handson than this well there's Rackspace it's the top
tier managed cloud computing company and they Pride themselves on best-in-class
service across all platforms they've got over
300,000 customers and 120 countries with
10 worldwide data centers whether you run a small business or a billion dooll
Enterprise you probably have needs for capacity so that is to say magnetic hard
drives or flash-based so that is to say high performance storage and I can
guarantee you they have some kind of a solution to meet your performance
security network capacity and compliance needs I mean they can handle anything
Daz so that's directly attached storage so it's great for like entry level uh
redundant arrays they've got so that's high availability and
reliability fully redundant storage that's actually outside of the machine
like elsewhere in the data center but with super highspeed links there's Nas
with support for very demanding workloads for example virtualization and
scalability up to 20 pedabytes of
capacity seriously go do the napkin math how much is that freaking incredible and
they've actually got public cloud and private cloud-based options available as
well so you can set up your own server with a scalable private cloud in your
data center or theirs and it's supported by Rackspace and VMware they refer to
their 247 365 support as fanatical and
they offer industry-leading service level agreements so the call to action
then is pretty simple Rackspace has your dedicated environments covered so check
out rackspace.com
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