Hello Friendos
I’m a security / cloud engineer and I’ve had this lab for about 6 months now. In the last few weeks I’ve decided to start using it to self host some “production” services for me and my loved ones (extended family of 15) Mainly a next cloud instance that serves as our “picture vault”
The hardware is a poweredge R430 with twin ES-2620’s and 128 GBs. It has 8x1TB 2.5
HDDs
This thing ended up being really overpowered for what I use it and I feel like by now I have explored everything I wanted to in this hardware. I was thinking about laterally scaling to R230s so I could play with load balancing and HA.
However these servers only have 2-4 drive bays, and I have no experience with DAS.
Can you guys help with some links? I’m researching DAS enclosures. I understand that any server with a PCI slot can take a SAS card, and any SAS enclosure is compatible.
Can you guys foresee any issue with a server as small as an R230 connecting to a SAS DAS?
I see that DAS enclosures have multiple connections per module, would I be able to connect multiple servers to the same module? or is it one server per connection and it can’t be shared?
If I have to share the connection, I would have to host a NAS (I probably should anyways) and will have to upgrade my switch from gigabit to 10G
Would also appreciate some other recommendations for small form factor servers that can be bought for cheap. (18 inches or shorter)
Pic of current setup for attention … don’t judge my PC case :) 3U chassis for it is on the mail.
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DAS is 1:1, It’s more or less like just connecting en external hard drive to your computer.
SAN can do some crazier stuff. You can take arrays and attach them to LUN’s and to sign luns to separate computers. You have fiber optic routing and virtual networks, sometimes iSCSI. But that stuff is extremely expensive and power hungry and did I mention extremely expensive
NAS is basically just a computer with disks attached to it sharing the data through one of her protocols you need.
For home gaming, even sharing with a extended family, truenas, unraid, or just a computer with ZFS is ideal.
ZFS is the elite but slightly harder way to do it. Your volumes all need to be the same size even if your disks are different sizes. There’s regular maintenance that needs to be applied, But it’s very fast and very flexible and very easy to expand.
Unraid is very slow but very flexible, the discs aren’t in a raid they’re in a JBOD, so really really slow, But if you lose one disc all you’ve lost is the data on that disk, and you can run up to two parity discs. As long as your parity drives are larger than your largest data drive.
Truenas is more of an unraid type situation but with a ZFS. Both unraid and truenas support virtualization and/or containers for running applications and give you nice metrics and meters and stuff.
You can hand roll with Debian, ZFS, docker and proxmox.
I think DAS is pretty much dead. If you have a ton of ephemeral data, and you need to do high speed work on it It’s a reasonable solution. But I think for the most part eight terabyte nvme has made it pretty niche.
about 5TB of the 7 I have available are in use. I was planning on expanding to 12 to allow for growth.
I could just upgrade to bigger drives (1 TBs currently) but it feels cheaper to go with DAS
Where does the coffee come out?
If you get a NAS with 10G (it’s such a nice upgrade, I made the jump last year), there’s no reason a nice NUC can’t do the job. I went that route after previously running significantly overpowered server hardware ten years ago. We have an embarrassment of riches with modern hardware.
I’ve considered it, but decent NUCs are much pricier than old discarded hardware.
I have a good source thru my job for tons of CTO hardware, these R230’s cost me about 50 bucks a pop, and considering they sip power they’re a really hard to pass deal, it sounds like a really good way to learn proxmox HA, load balancing and ceph minus the storage capacity
I guess I could still host a 10G nas on an r230 with a DAS, but my questions remain.
decent NUCs are much pricier than old discarded hardware
This can be true for some, but for a lot of labbers the increased energy cost of enterprise hardware will exceed the cost difference of the NUC over the expected life of the equipment. That doesn’t mean it’s an obvious choice to go the other way; it’s just something you should consider.
Good point. I actually have a watt meter coming in the mail tomorrow. Will measure the idle consumption of the r430 and report back. This thing sits mostly at under 10% except when running backups or the machine learning algos for nextcloud image recognition.
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It should have power monitoring in the idrac already.
Good Point, idrac has issues on this server, I’ll take another crack at it and see if I can get it going.
I tried with powerstat and powertop but no dice
Cool, more power to you.
In the short term a decent nuc is more expensive, in the long run… maybe not.
Re DAS: no you can’t connect multiple systems to it. iSCSI and NFS on a SAN or NAS support multiple connections but the OS or app needs to support it.
You should limit your connections to one machine per volume when using iSCSI or nfs. Smb would probably the best for multiple connections.
How much storage are you actually using? You could just split it between the r230s and set up zfs replication in proxmox.
