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Today i sketched out a storage setup, but since i am not very experienced with enterprise level storage, i would be very glad to have the concept reality checked by more experienced folks. Unfortunately, i didn't manage to find an existing question or report that matches this scenario.

Requirements are as follows:

  • ~400TB capacity with some kind of redundancy. There are off-site backups so full mirroring should not be necessary
  • There is only gigabit ethernet so the bandwidth requirement is at most to saturate this link
  • Few but large files
  • I'm trying to keep the cost around 10k€

What i am looking at is buying a used HP ProLiant DL360p, 2x Xeon E5-2660 8-Core 2.20 GHz and upgrading it with 32GB to 64GB ECC RAM. I will fit a PCIe8x Dell 6G SAS HBA (4 ports) to the server. Finally, i want to use three to four HP StorageWorks D2600 Disk Shelves, fitted with 12x12TB drives each. I have not yet decided what drives exactly, if there are suggestions, i'd be happy to hear them.

With the mentioned controller, i would even have a dedicated controller port for each shelf, so i could group drives per shelf (as a RAID/ZFS pool or whatever it will be) and have potential 6G SAS bandwidth for each one.

For the server, i suppose i will either use FreeNAS (so ZFS) or plain Linux and set everything up manually.

Is this a feasible setup or are there obvious flaws? I would be very grateful for any feedback.

user582746
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    "do my work for me, and please do my capacity planning for me too" - not going to happen. This type of euqestion is off topic here per site rules. – TomTom Jul 11 '20 at 20:47
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    Off Topic: Requests for product, service, or learning material recommendations are off-topic because they attract low quality, opinionated and spam answers, and the answers become obsolete quickly. Instead, describe the business problem you are working on, the research you have done, and the steps taken so far to solve it. – TomTom Jul 11 '20 at 20:47

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Biggest flaw is FreeNAS. It’s on the death row, ZFS on FreeBSD is being phased out by ZFS on Linux so I’d suggest to forget about FreeBSD and it’s fork outs and stick with Linux distro you’re familiar with. You don’t mention IOPS and redundancy level so it’s difficult to recommend how many RAIDz2 zvols you should stripe together to get what you want. Gigabit Ethernet sounds archaic.

BaronSamedi1958
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