The Storage Brick & What to do with it / call for the presentation / followup Detailed Storage Brick report Also at the Research Computing Support Table

Storage Brick in 1 Pic & 30 Words Tyan mobo; 4 Opteron cores, 8GB RAM,8TB in 3U 3xPower Supply, 3ware or Areca PCIe RAID controller 16x500GB hotswap SATA3 disks 6xGb etherNICs. 64-bit Linux. 1yr ago, <$10K

Free/OSS Software and your data. 'Free' != 'worthless'. The internet runs on Free Software. Beware of silly claims of reliability. Be aware of what you can control and what you cannot. Protect what needs to be protected. Institute protection plans for that data. Test them regularly.

Reliability vs Cost like unfunded mandates. "Does this data need $24 per GB storage or will 60¢ per GB suffice?" "How many bytes and how many $?" “Pretty Storage” - Pretty cheap, pretty secure, pretty available, pretty fast, pretty accessible, pretty flexible.

Take home messages Always use a journaling file system. ReiserFS (v3) for small files. XFS for large files, also excellent for formatting and mount times. If you have hardware RAID, use RAID6 for everything. Redundancy and performance is very good. If you only have software RAID, use RAID5 or RAID6. Use large RAIDs so parity loss is minimized. Areca and 3ware both very good, very fast. System RAM good. Card RAM less good. readahead is almost not worth thinking about, as long as it's above 1KB. Little advantage to more than 8KB. Battery Backup of card is critical for DB transactions, but otherwise not too helpful, especially if the entire is on UPS.

Recent Updates Striping of the RAID is significant. Find the median size of your active files. 64K is almost always too large. JFS is good, but dropped by IBM. mdadm works well for cheap, slow RAIDs. Reiser4 is very fast but in prison. Ext4 is looking better. ZFS (Solaris) starting to look very good.

Protocols? You want Protocols? NFS, SMB/CIFS, Appletalk, AFS, http, https, rsync, ssh, scp, sftp, webdav, iSCSI, AoE, FiberChannel Volume Management via LVM2 & EVMS Hardware and Software RAIDs of all types. Failover / High Availability / Clustering. Virtualization – VMware, Xen, VirtualBox Firewalls & NAT masq for multi-homing, DMZ

Filer Packages Appliances ie USR 8700 NAS Appliance FreeNAS – free, simple GUI, BSD-based Openfiler - free, full-featured GUI, Linux-based Open-e - $, sophisticated, ROM-based Naked Linux - free, full-featured (22,553 pkgs available), partial GUI

Cheap NAS Appliances Linux in BIOS on Freescale CPU. Just say No.

FreeNAS very small, very fast to install, boots from USB key full administration via web interface Based on small BSD from m0n0wall firewall Protocol: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, SSH, RSYNC and AFP, iSCSI target Hard drive: ATA/SATA, SCSI, USB and Firewire Filesystem support: UFS, FAT32, EXT2/EXT3 Software RAID 0, 1 and 5 Local User authentication and Microsoft Domains

OpenFiler almost everything that FreeNAS has and more, incl. iSCSi. much more complete web interface. LDAP/AD auth Can buy pre-installed and configured from a number of companies. Commercial support available.

Open-e solid-state disk-based system. completely plug & play. like openfiler but commercial. Available on ThinkCP products for an additional ~$1K.

Naked Linux Pros: You control everything - ~24,000 free packages Cons: Ditto.

BackupPC Web-based Perl server uses smb, rsync, tar, file pooling, compression to backup files Lots of users, list runs at an average of 11 postings/day, including the author. In Ver 3, users use a web interface to customize their backup config & restore their own files. Regular & on-demand Full & Incr Backups

rsync client For Win2k, WinXP User fills out web form, submits gets with rsync zipfile for correct version of Windows. unzips file at top level of C:\ driveC:\ runs a bat file to install rsync as a startup (Win2k) or service (WinXP)‏ That's it. Regular Full and Incr Back We're looking for beta-testers.

Storage Question Would you consider using such Bricks as a service from NACS? For what services? Under what conditions? What cost model?  flat $/TB?  $/TB/service? (BackupPC TB's vs NFS TB's)‏  $/TB/CPU