ServeTheHome.com

One thing that virtually every major storage player and enterprise has been using for the past few years, and is continuing to use, is a tiered storage approach. This is mainly due to the fact that lower capacity, higher-cost drives tend to have higher performance than larger and less expensive alternatives. The basic premise is to have the most frequently used data stored in the fastest accessible physical storage so that more transactional requests can be accomplished quickly. Augmenting this fast storage is lower cost, high-capacity storage that keeps less frequently stored data online. This guide is meant to be a primer on how this works in a few common scenarios for small businesses and home servers. It should be noted that for home servers primarily storing media files, tiered storage makes less sense since waiting a second or two extra to do hours of relatively low bandwidth sequential transfers is not taxing on storage subsystems. Read the full story

Welcome to 2011! Over the past year, the ServeTheHome.com readership has grown by almost 25 fold. In visiting other forums, I have noticed that each forum has a specific purpose. Windows Home Server, FreeNAS, unRaid, general data storage, general memory and motherboards and etc. What is lacking is a single place to discuss direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS), and storage area networks (SANs) in a single place. Specialized forms are great resources for in-depth support of platforms, however the advice can be far from objective. Read the full story

After completing the first DAS/ SAS Expander JBOD enclosure project I realized that there was a major area of improvement. Using less than 30% of a large 4U case’s volume for useful purposes seemed like the key area to improve upon. As I was completing that build I soon realized that I wanted a secondary server to be able to access some of the drives for EXSi or Hyper-V virtual machines. Further, NAS operating systems that run poorly in virtual machines, such as unRaid require dedicated server for testing. I could have built another server in another enclosure, but I decided that I could improve upon the original design and access drives that are housed in the Big WHS ecosystem through a simple cable swap. This eliminates the need to physically move drives from enclosure to enclosure. The following is a slightly (approximately $20) more expensive version of the original Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure with a HP SAS Expander iteration.

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Oftentimes, users running file servers such as Windows 2008 Server R2, Windows Home Server, Linux variants (including Openfiler), OpenSolaris, FreeBSD (including FreeNAS), and so forth will require more storage than their server can physically store. One option is to add more servers to the SAN. Another option is to add more storage to an existing server. Adding a second (or third) enclosure for additional disks is a great option. This allows a server administrator to build a massive DAS storage system very inexpensively for applications like iSCSI, backup storage, media storage, virtual machine storage, and etc. Oftentimes, the ensuing research will lead IT professionals to JBOD DAS enclosures with SAS expanders built in.

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To install FreeNAS in a Hyper-V virtual machine one needs to do some configuration of the virtual machine, just as one would with a physical machine. Allocating hardware resources is much easier in Hyper-V versus physical machines because you can do it remotely through screens instead of physically taking a box offline and installing hardware. This guide will show the basic Hyper-V virtual machine setup for installing FreeNAS, an open source NAS appliance based on FreeBSD.

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