I gotta be honest with you guys I didn't even look at this listing past the title
price and the first picture all I know is it's a big penis server it's got a
fair amount of capacity and it's a sand which is something that we've never
really had an opportunity to touch on before I didn't think they were actually
going to accept the offer tell me this Jake is it even possible we bought
something useful I've got the listing here I didn't really look at it that
much either I just saw that it was five thousand dollars and you said offer a
thousand dollars and then he said yes here we are I mean how much of that are
we even getting that's just a picture of a rat are we he wanted us to take the
whole wreck shut up and I was like he
agreed to let us not take the rack we're just taking what's inside that's good I
don't think that rack would even fit in the truck but does that mean that they expect us to take all of that equipment
is that all even j-box yeah what's that thing in the bottom it's four j-bods in
the controller server the best part is it's 96 hard drives but
they're 600 gig hard drives so the total capacity is like 60 terabytes we can
replace this entire thing with like three hard drives now we can replace
this entire thing with two of those keoksi ssds and it would be faster and
it would be faster so I talked to the guy on the phone a little bit this
company there are about 100 people so similar size is US yeah but they're
moving from in office to work from home they took all of their server equipment
and put it in a data center for a thousand bucks it's kind of a this is a
steal I mean even ignoring the drives because those are basically worthless
like how many hours do those have on them probably a lot 600 Gigabyte drives
you said yeah anyways the disc Shelfs themselves I've
seen go for 500 to a thousand dollars each on eBay because they're really
useful for home lab it's like the cheap way to get a bunch of storage you buy
one of these you put an HBA in your server and there you go one cable out to
24 drives 24 drives yeah they didn't just sell it to us because they knew the
channel or whatever did they no no he did say that he recognized us but it was
after oh there's the other thing these are gonna be SAS drives
oh that's actually kind of an inconvenience because it means that if
we just wanted to give them away at the Christmas party people couldn't even plug them into anything
I think they're dual controller as well yeah yeah they're SAS so this it's like
a redundant link to the drive oh that's awesome so if one of the controllers
goes down you're good 96 more Drive bays and that takes up what 16 years then
yep it's one of those super micro 90 Bays basically yeah it's not the most
space efficient but hey we just got a free rack
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Wi-Fi at the link below we're shooting on iPhone
oh and we're not even going to be able to hide it
we have a real camera it's going to take too long to set up
and it took a long time to get here so we're in a hurry hey how's it going hi
oh wait did you bring money you take e-transfer right yeah okay
wow
ouch damn I am loving the vibe here already look at this cable management
everyone knows it's better to have your Wi-Fi access point up high what better
way to get it up high than two cardboard boxes
it's almost like no one's actually been working here since the covid lockdown
and they just had to wait out they expired their lease oh we got some pdus
and this is it wow it came with the whole rack this is the big boy
okay I mean
no it was specific but all right yeah this has got to be at least 10 years old
is that about right did you guys buy it new yes
what was this what was this worth at least 100.
well hey that's uh this is the definition of pennies on the dollar then
yeah yeah yes my Hired Guns get it Hired Guns
two tickets yes well what I'm not gonna
do it look at this more like pea shooters how the devil are we gonna get
this out of here oh
yes that's a quality cart
hand crafted or at least hand upgraded
we've got a couple of options at this point I don't think there's any getting
around pulling the servers out but we're not actually obligated to take away the
rack it's only if we need another rack do we need another rack no could we use
another rack didn't we just buy a rack
I see should we take the rack if it's a quality rack I mean it's a NetApp rack
it's probably good so the the bed of the truck is technically available I mean
it's basically what we what we saw in the ad right
as expected the drives are 600 gigabytes
but you were wrong they are 15 000 RPM
this is what passed for high performance storage before solid state got
affordable enough that you could actually deploy it as a smaller medium
business I'm trying to see if there's oh yeah June 11th 2012.
that's 10 years ago 11 years ago yeah
wait is that the manufacturer date on the cold spares oh
yep these are cold spares the ones sitting here oh this one's different smart responsible people this is a 2.5
inch one but also from 2012.
oh September 2012. has this been on
since then pretty much since you got it consistently so these drives probably
have like eight or nine years of like consistent running
I'm trying to find the date code on this one this looks a lot newer oh yeah I
mean that's branded Seagate exos it's not even it's not even a Hitachi one
like this uh September 2019 on this one apparently this has been losing drives
at a rate about once a month last year and then it's been better behaved this
year oh oh there we go there's the face of the control it's kind of cute hey
I missed One servers had Swag Like This everything's really chaotic today so
you're gonna see me refer to notes on my phone don't worry about it some of you are probably asking yourselves what the
heck is a sen well anytime you've got a lot of machines be they servers
workstations or even individual client
stations you're going to need storage and one of the ways to do that is to put
all the storage in those individual machines but from a hardware maintenance
standpoint that can be really inconvenient because anytime you've got
any sort of failure well you have to go in you have to swap that storage out not
to mention that the provisioning of that storage can be really inconvenient maybe
one person needs a lot maybe one person needs a little maybe now those needs
have completely reversed now one way to work around that is to deploy a Nas and
that's what we do back at rstudio so essentially we've got a machine that
looks pretty much the same as this we've got a head unit that acts as a
controller and then we've got these shelves that are full of what are called
j-bots which are just just a bunch of this actually that's
what jblad stands for so each of these four U's is just power and drives that's
it there's no logic all of that is handled by this guy the difference then
is how the storage gets accessed our Nas
is at the office like most that operate in a Windows client environment use SMB
as their Network file transfer protocol and SMB and nasas in general are great
you could think of a Nas as kind of like a hard drive that 10 or 20 or 50
different people can all plug into at once and read from and write to
according to their user permissions at the same time even reading the same
files at once but it comes with some
downsides so for one thing file locking
if two people have the same file open and they both try to save it at the same
time you're going to end up with a conflict so it has Protections in place
that well lower performance SMB also
uses the TCP protocol for communication which compared to just plugging a drive
directly in your system is much higher latency which makes it totally
unsuitable for booting your system off of I mean you could run Windows over SMB
in the same way that you could run Windows off of an SD card but we've
shown you guys that it's really not a very good idea now let's talk about Sin
this is more like taking your drive or your 96 drives and slicing them up into
10 pieces or 20 or 50 pieces you take
those pieces and you allocate them to VMS or bare metal servers or
workstations or whatever you want and unlike SMB they are getting Block Level
access to that storage obviously there's
still a performance penalty from using shared storage because if some other
client is hitting the exact same drive as you well that head's got to seek
right but by building gigantic arrays by
filling them full of high performance drives these run at 15
000 RPM that is more than double even a performance consumer Drive theoretically
you can mitigate a lot of those performance concerns also because you're
not using tcpip you guys I'm assuming we're just plugged in using like iSCSI
over Ethernet yeah you're using a completely different protocol the same
one that you would be using with a direct attached Drive sort of sort of
sort of we don't actually discussion desktops anymore but you get the point
making for a connection that is so low latency that those computers have no
idea they don't just have a drive in them and under ideal conditions your
performance could actually be better I mean your bandwidth is going to be
limited by your Ethernet connection but say for example you were hitting a huge
data set with a ton of random reads and writes this would absolutely slay a hard
drive that's just plugged into your computer I mean look at it
yeah look at it we got to get this thing out of here
yeah yes it is and we actually brought
some for you guys as well so hope you enjoy them they're great for everything
from building PCS to you know adjusting
the cabinets in your kitchen to well really anything a screwdriver does
and three for you he made fun of me for being short
what the hell is wrong with you another advantage of a sin is reliability
individual drives can fail I already mentioned that but if it's in a device
like this there's all kinds of redundancy in place to keep your entire
operation from grinding to a halt for starters this is cool our controller
isn't actually one computer it's two computers ah here we go
that are working together in such a way that if one of them goes
down the whole system stays up and pretty much every aspect of this system
is architected just like that for example the drives themselves are dual
interface drives meaning that two separate controllers freaking wild can
plug into this drive at the same time meaning that if your controller dies so
that is the actual card inside the j-bod that's plugged into this drive there
separate controller that's also plugged into this drive then there's the fact
that there's all these drives right so they're obviously running some kind of I
mean this is what NetApp so some kind of proprietary raid oh you guys are raid
tended that's wild you guys could lose literally half of these drives before
you'd lose any data assuming they failed optimally or you could lose an entire
j-bod but that would be pretty hard because let's go look at the J bonds
everything is so cool each of them has not one not two not three but four
flipping power supplies and I'm willing to bet you could lose two of these
before you would actually lose power to this thing oh it would have to be the
optimal too though it would have to be this one and this one or this one and
this one not this one and this one by the look of things we haven't actually
opened these up yet we'll have to do that back at the office we got to get out of these fine folks hair very soon
here wait a second
now hold on a second why is there an RC
car battery in here what the TR oh that makes sense because
this is running old school Hardware raid so you've got a big fat RAID controller
on this card right here and then you've got a battery backup so
that if there's any data in flight and the server loses power it can store it
temporarily uh on the RAM cache so that
yeah this RAM is actually installed on the rate card so if there's any data in
Flight there that's a right cache it'll flush it to the disk once power is
restored hilarious the presence of the
controller in the head unit means I might be wrong about the Dual controller
thing I said earlier about these j-bods
do not leave this Bay empty uh oh
it's empty oh I get it this is a placeholder
sbb2 blank do not leave it empty
it's probably a cooling uh airflow routing issue
oh I did oh my God what this is only a
580 watt power supply are you kidding me we literally have power supplies and
servers that are this big they're like a thousand thirteen hundred what that oh
okay yeah so not very dense
compensating for something foreign
something to note is all the hard drives we transport on this thing are probably
toast there's that that anecdotal thing where some big Silicon Valley company
moved a bunch of drives like across the park was it IBM yeah moved a bunch of
drives across the parking lot and then like 30 of them failed within the next
couple months or something I forget the numbers on solid casters so they switched to using like rubber chunky
tires and that's fine yeah this uh that was also a really long time ago so it's
probably that hard drive Tech has gotten better these drives are a really long
time ago there's other benefits of sand that I haven't even touched on yet for
administrators having all your storage in one place is great for both
maintaining security within your organization and maintaining your
backups so instead of having backups flying around on the network all the
time packups are just done from drive to
drive so fast hey Jamie hey
awesome that is very heavy yeah it's not too bad though okay all of which raises
a really big question with all these benefits of sand why is
it that I've been so dismissive of the technology every time someone has
suggested that Linus Media Group should use it it certainly would have saved us
a lot of hours replacing drives or Imaging Windows just stupid it busy work
but that actually leads us into why we've never used one until you reach a
certain size of organization to the point where you've got people dedicated
on site who understand the architecture and can maintain it a sand can actually
add more complexity and more work than
it will save you compared to a Nas and for us because all of our editors work
on the same project sometimes at different stages in the editing pipeline
having individual storage pools that then they would transfer projects from
one to the next actually more efficient so for us Nas is
still the way but that doesn't mean that sand doesn't
still have a place a modern sand might have multiple tiers so for example you
could have a high speed flash sand that is the boot drives for all of your
system or that you could allocate storage from for a high performance
applications like running a database or running simulations on giant data sets
then it would have logic built in that takes data that's not being frequently
accessed and demotes it to lower speed magnetic storage or after that
eventually essentially archives it to a
tape Library just because these are kind of outdated units doesn't mean that the
concept of having all of your storage centralized is outdated at all and in
fact we saw a deployment like this when we checked out sfu's supercomputer a
couple of years ago I mean the sand thing really is just describing how the
clients connect to it I know that's why people getting so upset at us for not
running a sand I mean I haven't even gotten into the maintenance contracts
because we could have a sand that's just
our server running iSCSI yeah just running true Nas scale with in
connecting with iSCSI hey it's a sand in fact we will probably set that up for
the land machines at my house when we eventually put in those one new language
not every computer in your house you already have 10 gig to everything why not every computer in the office iSCSI
is easy enough to set up but you could probably do it yourself with a couple
tutorials on YouTube and you could use your Nas
to just use part of your storage in a sand type of configuration
it's really just about the connection so these are nothing special then
yeah I mean the controller I don't even know if we can like just install Linux
on it it might be very yeah do you guys know I could you just
like install like Ubuntu on that controller no yeah it's probably pretty locked down
yeah and that's not the only thing about this
that is kind of locked down these are SAS drives you wouldn't find
15 000 RPM SATA drives and SAS has some
advantages for Enterprise use but it has some disadvantages for one thing I can't
just take these drives and plug them into a random SATA controller on a
motherboard say to controllers can't talk to them however that doesn't
necessarily mean that these j-bods are totally useless to us we use almost all
SATA drives some SAS controllers will
talk to SATA drives so these are e-waste
these might not be I mean we could also just get SAS drives
oh they're so expensive how many clients did you guys have running off of this
thing uh we had 10 uh dell servers
running VMware oh okay so these didn't serve any
workstations or anything like that it was just all for those servers all for
those servers of course some file sharing but it was mainly all through the VMS
that makes sense oh that's something I didn't even mention earlier just because
you have a San doesn't mean you don't also have nasas so in this case the San
acted as storage for a file server that
could then act as a Nas for all the other clients on the network neat right
they're offering us more stuff hold on a second hold on vending machines
boardroom tables is that pool table available no one of the guys got it on
our internal draw ah ooh that seems unlikely my goodness
I'm afraid that my epeen is simply not
large enough to contain this table so I'll tell you what Jake what between you
and me Yvonne and I are thinking of moving again okay we're gonna move into a real
Mansion this time I'm thinking this dining room table
okay bubble embed a bunch of Technology I want I want literally get to put
stackers in the garage I want little pop-up screens at every place thing or
like little like iPad holders we're not putting a stacker in my garage
and we're not moving he says it but just wait we were trying
to find drives for this thing because it has a different block size so are they
forwarded by them and people have reformatted them so they'll work on a PC
but you can't go back yet another reason
to all of those who have asked why I never just bought a proper sand
Appliance oh okay I'm coming here comes the wreck
Here Comes The Rock boys how exactly were you guys planning to
put the wreck in here it looks a little tall it's gonna stick out a bunch and
then you have the straps holding it oh okay okay can you hold that yeah you
hold the cart I got these oh god well no no I we should each take
an end okay no no I mean really can you okay I
don't workplace injury it's just me okay
yeah you all right okay yeah
on the one hand we got five thousand
dollars worth of equipment for a thousand dollars on the other hand they
admitted when we were leaving that they had no idea it was listed for five
thousand dollars it was apparently supposed to be listed for five hundred dollars
ah did he say that yeah what yeah oh I I
didn't hear him say 500 yeah oh but but
they also gave us a bunch of stuff that otherwise would have ended up being e-wasted we got a couple of pretty
decent pdus we got the rack which is worth way more
than 500 bucks for the right buyer I mean and the the disc shelves are worth
at least a thousand bucks too oh yeah probably a thousand bucks at U.S not bad
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