HP MicroServer + ZFS = Win
I recently procured one of these beauties after staring enviously at the one we have on our desk for testing at work.
It’s a HP ProLiant MicroServer – a bit of a mouthful, but a good piece of kit! It comes with
- 2GB RAM
- 250GB HDD
- Dual-core AMD Turion II N40L processor
- Gig Ethernet
- More USB ports than I know what to do with
- Three more 3.5″ disk bays, which I filled with 2TB Western Digital disks
- Some flashy lights
I bought it after umm-ing and aah-ing about building a replacement for my ageing Windows Home Server file server. It’s huge, cumbersome, slow and, crucially, *noisy. *The case and CPU fans are so old and decrepit that I can hear it down the hall with my door shut. That, combined with the fact that the device has started to crash, reset and fail to boot on a regular basis meant it was time to upgrade/replace/destroy/purge (delete as appropriate).
So I got this thing after hearing rave reviews of how easy they are to run. Having populated it and powered it on, I found that it was so bloody quiet that if the little green light wasn’t switched on, I’d have no clue it was on in the first place…
, so that’s what I went with, especially after seeing this graph:
Even though this measures performance against Solaris Express, based on the data here, OpenSolaris would wipe the floor with FreeNAS.
The installation went by without a hitch! The unit quickly DHCP’d itself an address which is fine by me. Once that was done, it was time to apply updates and reboot – again, no worries whatsoever.
While this was going on, I stumbled across napp-it, a NAS distro. It turns out that it can also serve as a frontend to OpenIndiana. While I was happy to administer the server from commandline, I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to have a graphical interface for when I was feeling lazy.
Installation was, again, ridiculously easy:
wget -O - www.napp-it.org/nappit | perl
After about 10 minutes of the unit Doing Things under the hood, I found myself with a brand spanking new installation of napp-it!
Creating the storage pool from the three 2-terabyte disks was a doddle too! So now I have 3.56TB of space with the three disks in a RAID-Z pool. This means that one of the three disks can fail and I won’t lose All The Things. This fills me with a great sense of peace.
Also, the snapshotting capability of ZFS means I can back up important data on a regular basis, with an option of copying those snapshots to a remote server for added security!
Now, to copy 1.4TB of data from three (possibly four) NTFS-formatted disks that WHS used for its storage pool…