Whitebox SAN Server

27May09

Over the weekend I was busy re-assigning the role of one of the desktops into a SAN server. This machine runs on AMD Athlon 64 1.8Ghz and Gigabyte K8-NF9 with 2GB DDR and 80GB IDE disk. No special casing nor rack system were used, just the good old desktop tower casing and some 400watts power supply.

To beef the system up here’s what I’ve added:

• Areca Raid Controller 1220 – $860
  8 channel SATA, PCIe, RAID 0 1 10  5 6 JBOD
• 6 x 750GB Western Digital Green Power – $119 x 6
• Some old PCI graphic card – $0

Before all the RAID disk comes in, I instaled Openfiler 2.3 and make sure everything runs smoothly. It wasn’t such a clear cut at the begining, and the fact that you need to pay US$30 for the documentation doesn’t help much. But, yeah, googling around will definitely get you somewhere.

Once that’s done, the controller is installed along with all the 6 harddisks. Thanks to its simple yet comprehensive RAID management software, I was able to set it up pretty quicky. Before I knew it, I have 6 disks running as RAID 6, just by clicking here and there from the browser.

What I wasn’t sure was whether I should allocate all space to a single LUN or just allocate enough as that would leave the options open for me to expand or create new LUNs in the future. Being the newbie I am,  I went with the former option.

What again confuses me is that in openfiler, you can again have more logical volumes in each LUN. This time, I leave some space behind just in case. I allocate 500GB iSCSI for ESXi, another 2×10GB for me to test around with native OS, and lastly I have 20GB formatted as ext3 and shared via samba.

Next thing to do I guess is to benchmark the performance and tune it up a little. Adding server class NICs can also be considered, let’s see if I can get hold of those intel cards.

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