Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

**diif** · 08-02-2017, 05:19 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Overkill for two users with another in the future.
What are you backing the NAS up to ?
What network speed are you at ?

**Spork Schivago** · 08-02-2017, 06:28 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Right now, our download speed is around 60Mbps. For local LAN, we use CAT 6 gigabit ethernet. But the idea is to purchase it now and slowly build it up. I'll keep imagines of certain users hard drives, for a fee, and offer redundant backup.

For my stuff, I'm running out of room. I don't have a lot of hard drive space (around 4TB or so). Certain toolchains seem to take a lot of space. But what I really wanted to do was something like what Linode does. Once I get enough hard drive space, eventually buy one of those proliant servers, contact Empire Access, get a fiber line for business, setup some redundancy, get a whole home generator, and rent out shares for money.

I'm getting a developers license for cPanel, but I was thinking instead of paying Linode to rent part of their VPS, and paying for a cPanel license for the VPS, I could eventually pay for a dedicated license for cPanel / WHM and then just run my own dedicated server.

I was originally looking at consumer grade NAS's but I dunno. I like the commercial grade option, so I'd have the option of becoming a company like Linode, if I wanted to.

**Spork Schivago** · 08-02-2017, 06:39 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

And honestly Diif, I kinda really miss playing with those commercial grade servers and stuff. I get tired of repairing laptops all the time and replacing cracked screens on cell phones. I want to do something else. I offer TV repair and I get them, but not like I did in the beginning. I do a good job and my prices are fair, but a lot of times, these TVs just got crappy caps and I replace them with high quality ones and people say their TV runs fine now. They recommend me to people, but prices in TVs dropped a lot now. Same with cell phones. People say it's cheaper just to buy a new one or that it's not worth getting repaired. They don't even ask me for prices. They say oh, I only paid x amount of dollars. I just go buy a new one.

The PC repairs suck! I honestly cannot tell you how many times I've backed up files, formatted, reinstalled the operating system, restored the files, and put some basic programs on the computers. It's not fun anymore. I get one and I'm like uhhh! Obviously, not in front of the customer though.

Also, how do you pronounce your name? I've been pronouncing it Diff, as in Different. But my wife says she don't think it's pronounced that way. She's a lot better at spelling and pronouncing things than I am. In fact, it turns out half the words I've been using, they aren't even real words. She says things like it's Next door, not next store. And it's chimney, not chimley. Great woman though and I'm so happy we found each other and decided to bring a little one into this world.

**diif** · 08-02-2017, 11:37 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Qnap and Synology both make decent NASs. Buy 2, fill with large SATA drives and be done. Back one up to the other. I'd fill 3x1.2Tb in Raid 5 just by copying across one of my desktop drives.
diif is just my name one here. My name is Michael.

**diif** · 08-03-2017, 02:19 AM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Or fill one out with 1TB SSDs and the backup spinny drives.

**jondoe** · 08-03-2017, 07:42 AM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

The AJ941A is just a disk enclosure, it is not in of itself a NAS.

As a small to medium sized enterprise you'd be better off looking at Synology or better yet, QNAP.

**Spork Schivago** · 08-03-2017, 10:46 AM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Originally posted by diif

Qnap and Synology both make decent NASs. Buy 2, fill with large SATA drives and be done. Back one up to the other. I'd fill 3x1.2Tb in Raid 5 just by copying across one of my desktop drives.
diif is just my name one here. My name is Michael.

We're going to need more than 2.4TB of free space though. That was just to start, to get the RAID5 going, then we were going to slowly upgrade it.

I checked my hard drives last night to get a better idea of where all the space is going. The toolchains can take up a bit of space, but they're not taking up the most. The majority of it goes to these MKV files of the festivals we've been to (GrassRoots), but most of them are of the baby. They're currently taking up close to 3TBs.

I want to RAID them. The NAS will eventually hold these, to help protect them. I gotta find some way to burn them to blu-ray as well. The camcorder is a Sony HDR-XR150. I believe the bitrate is 24Mbps and the frames per second is 60. For some reason, they play better in Windows than they do in Linux. But maybe my PC is just too old to process them? They're choppy in Linux.

I could put them on the NAS I think. But eventually, I'd still like the idea of becoming a place like Linode, where I can rent out VPSes. I think that could be fun.

I'll start looking into the two manufacturers you recommended. I think I want to go for SAS drives instead of SATA, just for the sustained data rate.

**Spork Schivago** · 08-03-2017, 10:50 AM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Originally posted by jondoe

The AJ941A is just a disk enclosure, it is not in of itself a NAS.

As a small to medium sized enterprise you'd be better off looking at Synology or better yet, QNAP.

That's what Diif was saying. And yes, it is just a disk enclosure. But it can be used as a stand-alone or you can hook it up to a Proliant server. That's my goal eventually. Get a rack mount server to hook into the enclosure I purchase. But until then, I'll buy the enclosure and store images on it, important data for customers, for a price. Then when it pays for itself, I'll look at upgrading it or purchasing a server at that point.

I'm going to start looking into the Synology's and QNAPs. We've been purchasing Western Digital Blacks, which are good. Before the baby, we didn't need a lot of extra space. I didn't realize how big those MKVs were. I didn't think they were using all the space. I mean, hell, they fit on the camcorder. I didn't think they were this huge. Anyways, since she's been born, we've bought an additional 2TB drive. That's almost full now. It's at 89%.

**Spork Schivago** · 08-03-2017, 11:21 AM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

I wonder if I can use the NAS / disk enclosure to boot into some OSes as well. Maybe setup PXE in such away, where I could use a server to deploy the boot images over the network from the NAS. Maybe setup some sort of MAC filtering so the MAC address of the client determines what OS is booted.

I'll probably also store OS images for deployment on the NAS when I get it. I got a workstation I'm going to install Windows Server 2012 R2 on. If I can access the images from that workstation, I can deploy 8+ images to PCs I redo. Right now, I can't deploy 8+ images using dism. Microsoft says we can't do that with 8 or newer operating systems. This makes it a pain to redo a customers PC that has an OS like 8. I have to do a lot of Windows updates, and this takes forever. If I can just deploy a fully updated image, like I do with 7, that'll save a lot of time and I can really start pushing out these PCs.

It'd bring some fun back to it as well, because it's something new and interesting.

**jondoe** · 08-03-2017, 12:37 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

You say it can be used as a standalone, but I can't see any evidence of that, can you point me in the direction where it states that's possible? Unless we're mixing terminology here

It's not going to have a CPU/RAM!

**Spork Schivago** · 08-03-2017, 01:12 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Yup.

Page 13, in the Configure to Order Program Information. Unless I'm misunderstanding the paragraph....

Code:

Configure to Order Program Information

The D2600/D2700 models and options may or may not be factory installed in a rack with 
add-on controllers, and hard drives. The D2600/D2700 enclosures may be integrated with 
ProLiant servers or as standalone storage.

I took the "or as a standalone storage" part as meaning I could use this without the Proliant servers. Install some hard drives, formatted, and just hook it up to the local network, until I save the money to buy the Proliant servers, assuming I purchase this.

I got 1,500$ saved for this. I think that might be enough to purchase a used Proliant server, the disk enclosure and three 1.2TB SAS drives (open box). But I'm still looking into other options. I've looked at the QNAP enclosures, but they're a bit pricey when you start looking at the rack mount units and the units with more than a few bays.

**jondoe** · 08-03-2017, 01:36 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Interesting, I wonder what they mean by standalone? I am confused.

It looks like it has two IO modules with SAS connectors, unless you have something to interface with the SAS modules I can't see how you'd use the enclosure? There is an ethernet port on each IO card, but I'm going to assume that's for management.

**Spork Schivago** · 08-03-2017, 02:07 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Maybe I'll purchase the server first.

I was looking at the Proliant DL380 Gen 9. Here's a used one for a price close to what I have saved up.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HPE-ProLiant...sAAOSwFc5Xv01j

I like how to comes with some RAM, a CPU, a power supply, the SAS controller and two SAS hard drives.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HPE-ProLiant...sAAOSwFc5Xv01j

That could be a good starter server.

That 600GB would be a good start and I could setup up a samba server on it to access the files. Then slowly build it up for the whole VPS rental service idea.

**Spork Schivago** · 08-03-2017, 02:09 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Originally posted by jondoe

Interesting, I wonder what they mean by standalone? I am confused.

It looks like it has two IO modules with SAS connectors, unless you have something to interface with the SAS modules I can't see how you'd use the enclosure? There is an ethernet port on each IO card, but I'm going to assume that's for management.

Yeah, I started reading the document on the enclosure a bit more careful like, and I'm confused as to what they mean by stand-alone as well. I don't think I can use the hard drive enclosure by itself, like I had originally planned on doing, until I saved up for the actual server. But I think I'm going to go the opposite way now, and purchase a rack mount server and then eventually get the hard drive enclosure. That way, I can start using it right away. It won't have enough hard drive space to really do what I want to do, but I'd at least be able to use it to deploy some images, etc.

That would help me bring money in much quicker. And then with faster income, I'd be able to save up for the rest much quicker.

**jondoe** · 08-03-2017, 02:25 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

I think you dodged an expensive bullet there.

HP do plenty of Proliant server chassis with loads of 2.5" and 3.5" drive bay options. What you buy should be sized/spec'd for the work load, 10K drives and lots of spindles means lots of IOPS, do you need that? If you want plain cold storage and occasional access, that would be over kill, you could have less spindles and larger drives, etc.

**jondoe** · 08-03-2017, 02:32 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

I should also recommend a HP SE326M1R2 if you're looking for a custom NAS project, I run one myself!

**diif** · 08-03-2017, 02:34 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

I'd rather take a 1TB SSD over a pair of 10k 1.2TB SAS drives in raid.
Your images would be deployed in rapid time and you could use a desktop PC.

**jondoe** · 08-03-2017, 02:38 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

The 1TB SSD would have zero redundancy, is that wise in this scenario?

**diif** · 08-03-2017, 03:36 PM

Re: Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

As mentioned above it would be backed up to spinny discs in a NAS or another dirt cheap desktop PC. Raid isn't backup.

Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

Potential HP D2700 NAS purchase

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