Building a new SAN

• Osayidan wrote on 2013-10-15 15:28
  My old SAN I built last year from shitty cheap parts (other than the RAID card) is no longer good enough, so I'm building a new one.
  
  

  [Image: http://i.imgur.com/Bu1yECC.jpg]

  
  
  Got most of the parts delivered today. The chassis is all that's missing, that should come later this week.
  
  Once this one is built I'm going to transfer the data from my old SAN into this one, then add the RAID card from my current SAN into the new SAN. That will give me up to 16 slots for hard drives configured in RAID (chassis supports 20 drives). I'll have 4 slots left over to do some on-board RAID or something with SSDs in the future (if I store my virtual machine templates/masters on SSD they'll deploy ridiculously fast).
• Yoorah wrote on 2013-10-15 23:05
  Technically that's a NAS, not a SAN!
  And any reason for choosing that CPU? It's way too powerful for a NAS, but if you were building a server that does other things as well, I'd have gone with the hex cores myself.
• Osayidan wrote on 2013-10-16 00:20

  Quote from Yoorah;1159521:

  Technically that's a NAS, not a SAN!
  And any reason for choosing that CPU? It's way too powerful for a NAS, but if you were building a server that does other things as well, I'd have gone with the hex cores myself.

  
  
  CPU is just to avoid bottle necking there, since my current one does when doing san snapshots or if too many VMs are running. Once I have 2 raid cards in there and potentially onboard SSD raid i'll be making much more use of it. I also intend for this to last at least 5 years so may as well give it the extra power.
  
  It would be a NAS if it was just a file-level storage box, but this is block-level on it's own network, and the vmware hosts have dedicated interfaces to that network. It also could support clustering if I was rich enough to build 2.
• Taycat wrote on 2013-10-16 04:38
  Nice kitchen.
  Too bad I'll never be able to understand what you're doing.