Want Safe Data Storage? Get it as Far Away from Me as Possible!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,668 words · ~8 min read
0:00
this is a video I've been meaning to make for quite some time because I've
0:04
been meaning to practice what I preach
0:07
for quite some time and that is to always have a backup of your data
0:13
preferably one that is offsite which is easier to say than to do I mean if
0:18
you've just got a few smartphone pictures you can use a cloud account or
0:21
even burn a couple discs once a quarter to act as your Disaster Recovery storage
0:26
solution but if you're talking about dozens of terabytes worth of video and
0:31
we're talking video that could be needed at any given moment for smooth business
0:35
operation you better have something a little beefier so meet Cam Loop
0:49
server whether you run a small business or A1 billion Enterprise Rackspace has
0:56
your dedicated storage environments covered check out the link in the video
0:59
description to learn more so this project starts
1:04
actually with undoing most of what I had
1:08
planned from before I had intended to use the same Norco RPC 4224 case from
1:13
the high-speed SSD server which can handle 24 drives on sleds with a SATA or
1:20
SAS compatible back plane thing but iar
1:23
USA reached out and showed me this the ex 4M 36- exp and my plan plans changed
1:31
somewhat at that time so at the front of this case you'll find a 24 hot swappable
1:36
hard drive caddies that work with 3 and 1/2 or 2 and 1/2 in drives some sick ass
1:41
beefy 120 mm cooling fans and this SAS
1:46
back plane that connects on the inside with the usual Molex power connectors
1:50
and sff 887 SAS connectors with the
1:54
difference and this is cool being that it doesn't actually require six SAS
2:00
connectors for all those 24 drives you can even use just one if you want and
2:06
the back plane handles routing that traffic to all the connected drives now
2:11
obviously with just that one connector
2:14
you won't necessarily be able to run all of those bays at the same speed as if
2:20
they were individually plugged in but for an off-site backup server will where
2:24
we'll never do more than gigabit speed to the whole box this is way more than
2:30
enough but hold on a second Linus since
2:33
when is more than enough enough I
2:37
thought this was Linus Tech tips why aren't you sticking with the Norco case
2:40
that drives every single connected Drive individually at full speed great
2:45
question and we can answer it by going around the back of the ex 4M 36 ESP yes
2:52
friends that is another 12 drives back
2:55
there giving us a total of 36 drives of expansion that thanks to
3:01
the built-in SAS expander boards can be driven off of just two SF 887 ports
3:08
absolutely perfect for an unraid
3:11
deployment which doesn't mean that there aren't any compromises that were making
3:16
with a configuration like this I mean I get effectively only a 2u height
3:21
enclosure inside my 4u case to install
3:24
all the rest of my internal components so let's meet those internal components
3:28
shall we first is our motherboard a z9p u8 server board from ASUS with a couple
3:34
of features that make it ideal for this build number one is the ipmi intelligent
3:39
platform management interface module that we've added to it when you can't
3:44
have physical access to a server because it's a 6-hour drive away one of these is
3:49
critical because it allows you to perform low-level functions through a
3:53
dedicated special Ethernet port on the back that normally couldn't be done
3:59
through conventional Network control Solutions like team viewer or remote
4:03
desktop connection things like altering bio settings or hard resetting the
4:07
machine number two is that it's
4:11
compatible with some Hardware that we had lying around like these 46 gig ECC
4:16
DDR3 Kingston RAM modules that I've actually had kicking about the office
4:21
since uh course Kingston sponsorship deal for that whole room water cooling
4:25
project over a year ago and this Zeon e
4:29
5 2620 V26 core that I pulled out of our
4:33
storinator server when I needed a higher clocked CPU to overcome some SMB
4:38
bottlenecking so I could have tried to Source a better CPU in this case because
4:42
while 64 GB does give me the option to
4:45
run some VMS I suspect this machine
4:49
won't do much more than store files so I kept things pretty light for cooling I
4:55
obviously couldn't stick with my go-to server heat sink the noct to any
5:00
d9l because of the limited height that I had to work with so I opted for an
5:05
nhl12 with the top 120mm fan removed and
5:10
since this is only an 80 wat TDP chip with ample case air flow it's not really
5:14
a concern to just have that bottom fan on there next is our HBA card and I've
5:20
actually been using raid cards uh many of which I had lying around already so
5:24
it wasn't a matter of extra cost for HBA
5:27
or host bus adapter Duty but what I found out relatively recently
5:32
is that even ones with good jbod mode so
5:36
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
5:40
drive no raid they don't behave completely transparently which can
5:44
interfere with operating systems like freas and unraid getting proper smart
5:50
data readings from the drives so I'm actually using an LSI 9300 8i HBA so it
5:56
has zero raid capabilities whatsoever
6:00
then I've got a couple of mini SAS HD connectors that I can use adapter cables
6:04
to plug into my back planes leading us finally to hard drives yes my friends
6:10
the 8 tbte Seagate Enterprise capacity drives are making yet another appearance
6:15
here in all of their Glory these are only SATA drives but for our workload it
6:20
really won't make any difference and SAS controllers are compatible with SATA
6:25
drives just not the other way around which you can learn more about here so
6:29
these are true Enterprise grade drives not the shingled archival ones and
6:33
they're capable of their full read and right speed so somewhere in the
6:37
neighborhood of 230 to 240 megabytes per
6:40
second According to some right speed testing that we did when you're just
6:44
hitting one drive at a time freaking awesome they also offer excellent
6:48
resistance to vibrations from nearby machines a must for data center
6:52
deployment and a massive 2 million hour meantime between failure rating with all
6:58
of them installed then so we actually had only 23 left after the ones we've
7:01
deployed already all that's left to find out is how much performance we can get
7:07
with so many drives hooked up to a single connector and actually that is
7:12
looking pretty darn good thanks to the 12 gbit per second SAS controller we're
7:16
using and the rated internal bandwidth of about 2.4 GB per second for that SAS
7:21
back plane at the front we could write to our array of 22 discs at about 2 gab
7:28
per second more more than we'll need even if we upgraded to 10 GB internet
7:33
since this server will be off site freaking
7:38
Ballin speaking of Ballin were you thinking you might want a solution
7:42
that's a little bit less handson than this well there's Rackspace it's the top
7:48
tier managed cloud computing company and they Pride themselves on best-in-class
7:53
service across all platforms they've got over
7:56
300,000 customers and 120 countries with
8:00
10 worldwide data centers whether you run a small business or a billion dooll
8:04
Enterprise you probably have needs for capacity so that is to say magnetic hard
8:09
drives or flash-based so that is to say high performance storage and I can
8:14
guarantee you they have some kind of a solution to meet your performance
8:18
security network capacity and compliance needs I mean they can handle anything
8:22
Daz so that's directly attached storage so it's great for like entry level uh
8:27
redundant arrays they've got so that's high availability and
8:31
reliability fully redundant storage that's actually outside of the machine
8:36
like elsewhere in the data center but with super highspeed links there's Nas
8:41
with support for very demanding workloads for example virtualization and
8:46
scalability up to 20 pedabytes of
8:49
capacity seriously go do the napkin math how much is that freaking incredible and
8:55
they've actually got public cloud and private cloud-based options available as
9:00
well so you can set up your own server with a scalable private cloud in your
9:04
data center or theirs and it's supported by Rackspace and VMware they refer to
9:10
their 247 365 support as fanatical and
9:14
they offer industry-leading service level agreements so the call to action
9:18
then is pretty simple Rackspace has your dedicated environments covered so check
9:22
out rackspace.com
9:25
LTT so thanks for watching this video guys if the video sucked you know what
9:29
to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even
9:32
consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon
9:35
buying a cool shirt like this one instructions up there or with a direct
9:39
monthly contribution through our form you get a cool little contributor badge
9:42
now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what should I watch next great question and
9:46
you should definitely check out our lightsaber how to build a lightsaber and
9:50
battle with them thing over on Channel Super Fun make sure you get subscribed
9:53
to Channel Super Fun we're going to have lots of cool stuff over there