100TB of High Speed Storage - The AMAZING Storinator Mass Storage Server
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,739 words · ~8 min read
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all right so I gave you guys an update on some of the Ballin new server gear
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that we've had arriving for the new office including a powerful Zeon based
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storage server the plans for which I've actually already kind of revised and our
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new $2,000 12 Port 10 G network switch
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but today we're going to kick things up a notch with a custombuilt
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storinator mass storage server from 45
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drives.com that features over 100
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terabytes of highspeed storage so strap
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in guys cuz this gonna be
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good Intel's new 750 series ssds
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utilizing the NVMe standard provide speeds never before seen on consumer
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storage drives click my hair to learn
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more so the problem we're trying to overcome here seems straightforward on
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the surface how to store all our data
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but when you go out in the real world and see entire video production houses
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running off of USB and Thunderbolt
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external drives or coming up with long-term archival Solutions like write
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the dates on the sides of the drives and put them on a shelf in the bathroom
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completely exposed to dust moisture and accidents as if this was the VHS home
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video Dark Ages it suggests that we've been asking maybe the wrong questions
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all this time because it's not about storage it's about accessibility the
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number of times that we've gone to do our review of some exciting new nextg
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product and gone hey maybe I'll grab some full quality footage of its
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predecessor from our old video for comparison which a it's on the archive
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shelf isn't it guess I'll do what we always do and download the old video
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from YouTube then slice it up in crappy quality that happens more than I'd like
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to say and obviously that's not a solution that makes sense as Linus Media
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Group continues to scale the amount and quality of footage that we're storing as
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well as the number of people who need to access it as our company grows so let's
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talk storinator s45 the middleof the
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road model that we chose that sits in between the more quiet SMB optimized 30
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Drive version and the monster xl60 Drive
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version in the front you'll find three 120 mm cooling fans to push air through
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our drives with a custom Linus Media Group logo painted onto the graphite
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powdercoated chassis on top then behind that three rows of 15 slots that give us
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the 45 drive capacity for this sucker
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further toward the back we find another two 120 mm fence that will pull air
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through the drives and then the system Hardware chamber that exists only to
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power the other 2/3 of the case overall it strikes an unusual balance
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between being objectively professional grade with all the core components an
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Intel 2.1 GHz 6 core xon CPU 128 gigs of
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Kingston ECC DDR3 RAM a super micro motherboard a 2 plus one fully redundant
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700 W power supply three 16 Port SAS
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controller cards from LSI and an Intel X540 10 GB network card are from brands
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with reliability reputation ranging from excellent to Legendary and yet it has a
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small custom system builder or DIY feel
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to it that comes from things like the blue LED lit Vandal switch at the back
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that's used to power the unit on the flat cable managed but obviously off the
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shelf Molex Splitters that provide Power to up to 45 drives at a time the Fairly
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rudimentary PC Builder tool on their site and the general Simplicity of the
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enclosure design that other than the fixed back plane something that I really
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prefer compared to just loose cables as
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a smaller operator who's going to Tinker with these machines versus chucking one
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of the hundreds of them in my data center out if there's some kind of an
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issue it looks like something that could be made in a pretty normal fabrication
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shop what a cool machine but of course that's not what you guys are here to see
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the storinator isn't the star of the show today it's more of an enabler so
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after installing freas a FreeBSD based
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storage operating system with Native ZF FS support that you can learn more about
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here it was finally time to break out
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the hard drives now while Seagate
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sounded like I punched them in the gut when I told them that I needed 27 drives
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for this project they also understood that if you're actually serious about
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having fast reliable network access to
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your 4K footage for a number of operators at a time you need a lot of
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drives and they have to be high performance so many drives in fact that
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they won't even fit in one master carton shipping box so once we'd figured out
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how many 27 The Next Step was to determine which model of drive we would
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be using honestly for most people and
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small businesses for that matter nothing more hardcore than a Nas hard drive
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would be required they're rated for 24/7 operation they offer reasonable if not
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earth shattering performance certainly more than a gigabit network connection
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would require they go up to 4 terab that gives you 24 tab of storage with a
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couple of discs for redundancy and they can be obtained for under $40 us per
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terabyte they're kind of like the city bus of hard drives but this is Line This
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Tech tip suckers so I'm going ride around in a 747 instead sorry anyway uh
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because we have more than just hand camed Vlog footage to deal with these
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days sometimes even sponsored projects for customers where data loss is not an
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option we opted for seag Gates Enterprise capacity drives unlike their
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Nas or even Enterprise NAS Drives which are rated for the adverse conditions and
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vibration associated with up to eight or 16 Bay drive enclosures respectively the
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Enterprise capacity drives feature exotic interfaces up to 12 GB per second
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SAS big capacities up to 6 terabytes per
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Drive top-of-the-line performance 10 times the workload rating of their
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desktop Drive counterparts at 550 terabytes per year and they do all
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of this while managing external vibrations so you can pack them in as
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tight as you can pack them pretty much which I guess means it's time to start
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talking about how that went so to start things off I went with nine drives in a
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ZFS 2 configuration this gives me just
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shy of 80% storage efficiency with two
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of my drives dedicated to redundancy I used one of my two SSD rad array clients
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here that are both on the same 10 GB Network and achieved readand right
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speeds in the 300 plus megab per second range not too shabby but I mean I wasn't
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really sure what to expect at this point expanding a ZFS storage server is both
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simple and kind of complicated as long
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as you have the same number of the same capacity of drives it's extremely fast
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and basically a few button presses to
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get her up and running but don't get your hopes up about simply adding a
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tenth drive to an existing nine Drive array like you can do with a hardware
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raid card it just doesn't work that way
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unfortunately the good news is that adding another set of drives should
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yield a significant Improvement in performance since it's effectively
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striping data across the two sets
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unfortunately that wasn't my experience I saw the same numbers as before so
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after soldiering on and adding my third set of nine drives for a total of 27 and
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over 100 terab of storage and then
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realized ing that the performance needle still hadn't budged I figured it was
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time to throw another client at the problem so with two clients two SSD
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based gigabit clients excuse me 10 GB clients copying 20 GB of data
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concurrently speeds were effectively doubled I got perfect scaling indicating
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that both drive speed and the speed of the network card in our storinator are
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not bottlenecks but unfortunately I
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don't have any more 10 GB clients at the moment so this Victory and Discovery
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also means that we're done for the time being until we move into the new office
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where I can give it two aggregated network connections for 20 gbit pers
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second total fre rical speeds and then
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Hammer this thing with half a dozen clients at the same time to find out
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free all right guys that's pretty much it like this video if you liked it
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again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe and follow and all
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