More Power To Us Part 2: The Juggernaut
July 20th, 2006 at 12:22 pm by zack
Alongside the cpu issues that Wolverine is taking care of, we also were at a slight lack of free disk space in the server rack. As hinted to a few weeks ago, we started looking at cost effective ways to get tons of space.
Our solution wound up at a 15 sata hot swap chassis from SuperMicro, the SC933T-R760. This is a well engineered chassis that has all of the features we were looking for, including 6 hot swap fans and 3 hot swap power supplies. We connected the sata hot swap backplane to a Promise SuperTrak 8300 8 port sata host bus adapter. As time goes on, we can add another of these controllers to take advantage of all 15 drives. The controller is special in that it supports hot swap, hot spare and hot growing of the array.
As it stands, we’re using 4 of the 15 drive bays, for a raid 5 total of 1.5TB of usable space.
The machine is a very basic p4 2.8ghz with 2gb ram and 2x gigbit ports. Just enough to keep all the drives running at full speed.
Now for the pics:
The insides of the chassis:
Me trusting our rack with my life:
July 24th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
Wow, this is great info. What OS is it running? How is it connecting to the host? iSCSI, ethernet, etc??
Thanks for the info
Dennis
July 26th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
Is it wrong of me to be hoping for the rack to fall on Zack?
August 5th, 2006 at 8:22 am
RAID 5 1.5TB with 4 drives?… Ok..
Your OS is on the same drives/Raid array as the Data? and with 64 bit pci ports, 15 drive bays, and you stuff everything through the equivalent of one disk IO ? (one raid channel).
Bit of a waste of a top notch chassis innit?
August 9th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Dennis: It’s win2k3 r2. The drives attach via sata. The whole machine is connected by dual gigabit connections to the rest of the servers.
Drew:
Mr C: That didn’t escape us, but our goals of Simplicity, Expandability and Cost say that we made an acceptable choice. The best part about this setup is that we can cram in another drive and expand the array onto it. That way, we don’t have to change our software config when the 1.5tb isn’t enough space.
October 11th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
[...] If you’ve read the other articles in the More Power To Us series, you know that the SnapStream co-location facility has a good amount of drive space. [...]