Hello Friendos
I’m a security / cloud engineer and I’ve had this lab for about 6 months now. In the last few weeks I’ve decided to start using it to self host some “production” services for me and my loved ones (extended family of 15) Mainly a next cloud instance that serves as our “picture vault”
The hardware is a poweredge R430 with twin ES-2620’s and 128 GBs. It has 8x1TB 2.5
HDDs
This thing ended up being really overpowered for what I use it and I feel like by now I have explored everything I wanted to in this hardware. I was thinking about laterally scaling to R230s so I could play with load balancing and HA.
However these servers only have 2-4 drive bays, and I have no experience with DAS.
Can you guys help with some links? I’m researching DAS enclosures. I understand that any server with a PCI slot can take a SAS card, and any SAS enclosure is compatible.
Can you guys foresee any issue with a server as small as an R230 connecting to a SAS DAS?
I see that DAS enclosures have multiple connections per module, would I be able to connect multiple servers to the same module? or is it one server per connection and it can’t be shared?
If I have to share the connection, I would have to host a NAS (I probably should anyways) and will have to upgrade my switch from gigabit to 10G
Would also appreciate some other recommendations for small form factor servers that can be bought for cheap. (18 inches or shorter)
Pic of current setup for attention … don’t judge my PC case :) 3U chassis for it is on the mail.
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If you get a NAS with 10G (it’s such a nice upgrade, I made the jump last year), there’s no reason a nice NUC can’t do the job. I went that route after previously running significantly overpowered server hardware ten years ago. We have an embarrassment of riches with modern hardware.
I’ve considered it, but decent NUCs are much pricier than old discarded hardware.
I have a good source thru my job for tons of CTO hardware, these R230’s cost me about 50 bucks a pop, and considering they sip power they’re a really hard to pass deal, it sounds like a really good way to learn proxmox HA, load balancing and ceph minus the storage capacity
I guess I could still host a 10G nas on an r230 with a DAS, but my questions remain.
decent NUCs are much pricier than old discarded hardware
This can be true for some, but for a lot of labbers the increased energy cost of enterprise hardware will exceed the cost difference of the NUC over the expected life of the equipment. That doesn’t mean it’s an obvious choice to go the other way; it’s just something you should consider.
Good point. I actually have a watt meter coming in the mail tomorrow. Will measure the idle consumption of the r430 and report back. This thing sits mostly at under 10% except when running backups or the machine learning algos for nextcloud image recognition.
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Your UPS doesn’t show power consumption?
It does but there’s a lot of other stuff connected that I can’t unplug. I ended up getting a kill a watt and since the server has redundant power supplies I checked by unplugging one at a time.
I’m using 168W on an R430 with 2 E5-1220’s and 128 G and 8 spinners.
Cool, more power to you.
In the short term a decent nuc is more expensive, in the long run… maybe not.
Where does the coffee come out?
Re DAS: no you can’t connect multiple systems to it. iSCSI and NFS on a SAN or NAS support multiple connections but the OS or app needs to support it.
You should limit your connections to one machine per volume when using iSCSI or nfs. Smb would probably the best for multiple connections.
Not your question sorry, but since your hosting next cloud what’s your experience with it, because I find mine pretty slow and not really smooth
My previous experience is with dropbox and onedrive and I tend to limit bandwidth … I want sync to happen in the background. It’s not something I usually consider “high priority”
I found NC to be a lot more flexible and complete, specially with all the machine learning options. I also appreciate the privacy and price Hosting about 7TB of data for $10 worth of power a month and a $150 investment that allows me to host many other things.
The web interface in my case is a bit slow initially but that’s mostly because I opted to route it via pangolin reverse proxy / cloud flare tunnels, but I notice once the redis cache DB loads it’s blazing fast.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the speed, I’m sharing this with a family of 15 and I haven’t heard any complaints yet.
about 5TB of the 7 I have available are in use. I was planning on expanding to 12 to allow for growth.
I could just upgrade to bigger drives (1 TBs currently) but it feels cheaper to go with DAS
