The Lenovo Storage DX8200N powered by NexentaStor provides an affordable, highly efficient and durable storage platform to meet the massive data growth. It provides. TB ZFS on Linux Project Cheap and Deep Part 1. Posted By Jon on Aug 3, 2. Best Pmp Exam Simulation Software on this page. This is Part 1 of my 8. TB ZFS on Linux series if youre looking for Part 2, follow the link below 8. TB ZFS on Linux Setting Up Ubuntu Part 2. TB ZFS on Linux Configuring Storage  Part 3. When looking to store say, 8. How To Install Nexenta From Usb' title='How To Install Nexenta From Usb' />AWS S3 and or Glacier. Its hard if not impossible to beat the GB and durability that Amazon is able to provide with their object storage offering. In fact, with the AWS Storage Gateway you can get block storage access to AWS for a decent price within your data center. The Lenovo ThinkServer RD350, now available with Intel Xeon E52600 v4 processors, is a 1U twosocket rack server that blends outstanding flexibility and. However, sometimes AWS is not an option. This could be due to the application not knowing what to do with AWS API calls or maybe there is some legal or regulatory reason that the data cannot sit there. After ruling out cloud storage options your next thought might be to add as much capacity as required, with overhead, to your existing storage infrastructure. Hundreds of terabytes, however, can result in 5. M of expense depending on what system youre using. In fact, a lot of the big players in the storage arena who support this kind of scale do so by licensing per terabyte think Compellent, Net. App, EMC, etc.  So while the initial hardware purchase from EMC or Net. App may seem acceptable the licensing fees will surely add up. VirtualBox is a generalpurpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professionalquality. How To Install Nexenta From Usb' title='How To Install Nexenta From Usb' />A photo review of SuperMicros new SC847A chassis, along with build photos. The ultimate homebrew storage solution News and feature lists of Linux and BSD distributions. In this example, however, the requirement is literally as much storage as possible, with some redundancy, for as little cost as possible  Lets do it Choosing the OSfilesystem. If you follow my blog you may know that I experiment with different storage technology. I have played around with different solutions such as Windows Storage Spaces, Nexenta, Free. NAS, Nutanix, un. RAID, ZFS on several different operating systems, Btrfs, Gluster, Ceph, and others. Because of the budget for this project, the first thing that popped into my head was ZFS on Linux. The reason ZFS stood out to me was because of its redundancy and flexibility in storage pool configuration, its inherent sane support for large disk rebuilding, its price, and the performance it can offer. Today, you can run ZFS on Ubuntu 1. LTS with standard repositories and Canonicals Ubuntu Advantage Advanced Support. That makes the decision easy. You could also build this on Solaris with necessary licensing if you wanted to that route but itd be more expensive. Unfortunately Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not support ZFS yet and so that option was not in the running though Id have gladly gone that route as well. ZFS on Linux Zo. L will also run on Cent. OS, Fedora, etc. Hardware selection. After determining how Id approach this solution from a software perspective, I needed to figure out the hardware component. The only requirements I have for this project is that I need to hold as many disks as possible, support SAS2 or better for large disks, present the disks directly to the server no hardware RAID, and it must be affordable. So, weve pretty much ruled out building a storage node using Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, etc. So whats left  There are a couple whitebox type solutions out there, but Supermicro is obviously the industry standard for when you dont want to pay a big name for a serverbox. In fact, more often than not, Supermicro is building the physical boxes that the other manufacturers are selling, anyway. I spent some time browsing the offerings from Supermicro and came across two solutions that would work for my situation. I ended up between the Supermicro SSG 6. R E1. CR6. 0L or the SSG 6. R E1. CR9. 0L the E1. CR6. 0L is a 6. 0 bay 4. U chassis while the E1. CR9. 0L is a 9. 0 bay 4. U chassis.  This nice part is that no matter which platform you choose Supermicro sells this only as a pre configured machine this means that their engineers are going to make sure that the hardware you choose to put in this is all from a known compatibility list. Basically, you cannot buy this chassis empty and jam your own parts in boo, hiss, I know but this is for your own good. For this build I went with two of the SSG 6. R E1. CR6. 0L machines so that I have one in a production environment and one in a second environment that can be used for replication purposes. The reason for choosing the 6. PCIe slots available. This means that if you outgrow the 9. I could add a PCIe HBA with external connections such as Broadcom SAS 9. With the chassis selected there are only a few other configuration items I needed to decide on. These items include spinning disks that make up the ZFS pool, PCIe NVMe disks optional, for pool SLOG, solid state disks for OS install, network interfaces, CPU, and RAM. I built each system with the following configuration 2 x Intel E5 2. C8. T 2. 6 GHz CPUs. GB DDR4 2. 40. 0 1. Rx. 4 ECC RDIMMs 2. GB total2 x Micro 5. MAX 2. 5 SATA 2. GB 5. DWPD disks for OS2 x Intel DC P3. GB, NVMe PCIe. 3. SSDs SLOG for ZFS pool5. HGST He. 8 8. TB SATA 7. K disks. 1 x integrated Broadcom 3. SAS3 IT mode controller. Supermicro SIOM 4 port 1. Gbps SFP Intel XL7. NIC2 x Redundant Supermicro 2. W Power Supplies with PMBus. The reason for the modest CPU is because I will not be doing anything with deduplication or similar. Compression in ZFS is almost free in terms of performance impact, so Ill utilize that. Deduplication is too memory intensive, especially for the amount of storage Ill be using, to be practical. So, in all, the CPUs will sit mostly idle and I didnt see the benefit of using faster or higher core count models. Youll notice the machine is equipped with 2. GB of RAM which may sound like a lot but is not too intense considering the box holds so much storage. If youre familiar with ZFS youll know that this will comprise what is referred to as the ARC or Adaptive Replacement Cache the more the merrier. At first I considered partitioning the Intel DC P3. L2. ARC cache and SLOG for the ZFS pool. However, using a dedicated L2. ARC device means that Ill be further dipping into my ARC capacity and this would more than likely have a negative effect considering the workload Ill be dealing with. Speaking of which youre probably wondering what this machine is going to do Ill be presenting large NFS datastores out of this Supermicro box to a large VMware cluster. The VMs that will use this storage are going to have faster bootapplication volumes on tiered Net. App storage and will use data volumes attached to this storage node for capacity. Even though this will be the slow storage pool, its still going to perform pretty well considering itll have the PCIe NVMe SSD SLOG device, good ARC capacity, and decent spindle layout. More on all of this later, though Racking it up. Alright everyones favorite part putting it together This part seemed fun at first, but then the reality of having to rack two 4. U chassis each with 5. Its not actually that bad the Supermicro hardware is very nice for the price. I was pleasantly surprised with the build quality of all of the Supermicro components. They even include cable arms with these devices. Shown above is the Supermicro SSG 6. R E1. CR6. 0L.  Youll notice that it has the typical Supermicro coloring and overall look. One nice feature is the small color LCD screen on the front that displays statistics and informational messages about the hardware inside. Because this 4. U chassis is designed to hold 6. As a result, the unit needs to slide out of the rack in full or about 9. The screen on the front will show you the health and status of all 6.