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Monday, February 5, 2007
One of the hottest selling products in the enterprise space today is NAS (network attached storage). While there are lots of vendors to choose from, there is one more alternative - to build one on your own. When our own 1 TB NAS was full, we decided to get a little adventurous. The thought of building one was more exciting than buying a commercial one. So like good analysts, the first step we took was to do a requirement analysis, and this is what we came up with. We wanted a NAS which had about a TB of storage space with redundancy, could be mounted in our server rack , would connect to our 1 Gbps backbone, join our existing Directory Services (essentially LDAP), and have an easy to use Web based management interface.
| Direct Hit! |
Applies To: CIOs, CTOs
USP: Save costs by building your own enterprise-class NAS
Primary Link: N A
Google Keywords: N A |
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An extensive research for all this brought us to the conclusion that everything was easily available except the server cabinet. Actually. in India the concept of assembled rack mountable servers is still in its infancy. As a result there is no known mass manufacturer of such cabinets.
We did a week's long search in different computer markets including Nehru Place, and figured that there are some local manufacturers who build such cabinets and sell them. We got hold of one of them and got two different prices for a standard 2U cabinet, which could hold upto five hard disks. The prices were Rs 12,000 and 14,000 depending on whether you opted for railings with the server or not. The railings are basically two sliding iron plates which get fixed on both sides of the server and lets it slide out and in from the Server Rack. We opted for a cabinet with railings.
| Shopping cart |
| Components |
Unit price |
Cost (Rs) |
| Server Cabinet |
14,000 x 1 |
14,000 |
| M/B with 5 HDD RAID |
11,800 x 1 |
11,800 |
| Processor (P4 3.2) |
5,000 x 1 |
5,000 |
| DDRAM (1 GB) |
6,500 x 1 |
6,500 |
| Graphics Card |
1,500 x 1 |
1,500 |
| DVD drive |
1,500 x 1 |
1,500 |
| SATA 300 GB HDD |
5,200 x 5 |
26,000 |
| Total |
|
Rs 66,300 |
Other Components:
Windows 2003 R2 with Storage Server*, 1 Gbps LAN Card**, and Flash Memory and memory reader*** |
*We opted to go with Windows Storage Server 2003 with Storage Server Feature Pack, but you can eliminate the cost of the OS by using an open-source variant like FreeNAS and Openfiler. While FreeNAS is easy to configure and takes only a few minutes, Openfiler has a huge set of features to give your NAS the cutting edge.
** You can also connect an extra NIC to your server and get High Availability and Network Load Balancing. Most NAS OSs including Openfiler and MS Storage Server have these features built-in. All you need is to spend around Rs 1500 for an additional Gbps card and you are on.
***You can easily save a good amount of money by installing the OS on to a CF or a flash card instead of a hard disk. But for this you have to
either select a NAS OS which has a very small footprint or you have to create your own stripped down version of the OS to let it work. A readymade option could be FreeNAS. |
The next task was to get a motherboard, which can connect 5 SATA HDDs and have RAID 5 support. We found an MSI board (MSI P965 Platinum) that fulfilled our requirements. Rest was easy to get-300 GB HDDs, processor, RAM, etc.
There is one more element missing in our component list -hot swap option for HDDs. But this requires a special cabinet that's difficult to find in the market, and is quite expensive. What we've built is a very basic NAS box. Here's how we did it.
Display Card
The shape of our cabinet didn't allow us to connect the AGP card so we had to connect a VGA cable (taken from an old mobo) from the card to the cabinet. But this requires a bit of soldering. So if you want to avoid this, make sure your NAS mobo has an in-built display card
Processor
You need at least a P4 2.8 or 3.0 GHz CPU for your NAS. In our shootout, all NAS boxes came with P4 processors and one even had a Core 2 Duo
Cabling
Tie the wires inside the cabinet properly so that they don't block air flow inside the device
RAM
Atleast DDR II 1024 MB is required for your NAS to work properly but keep the option open for scalability by keeping some RAM slots free
Heat Sensor
Try to get a cabinet which monitors the cabinet temperature from different regions. It will help to keep your NAS cool
Hard Disk
Avoid using multiple hard-disk controllers if you are going for a RAID card. Connect all the disks into it only or connect all of them
to the motherboard
Cabinet FANs
While selecting a cabinet, make sure it has ample fans for cooling every part of the cabinet
Fan & Temp Controller
Besides fans, go for temperature controller . The one we got had a separate controller that can set temp warning level and fan speed for the cabinet. It also has an LED panel that displays inside temperatures
Anindya Roy with Vijay Chauhan
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