Part III

Operating System: The operating system is the core software part which runs the servers (NFS, CIFS, etc) serving data, and is the platform on which the manageability tools run. Most of the high end disk servers vendors have their own OS specifically designed and tweaked for the sole purpose of file serving. Considering the market audience and cost structure of our fileserver, we cannot go over such an attempt. The storage server from Microsoft is another alternative, but it too costs an amount, and further licensing makes it impossible to scale in a cost effective manner. On the other hand, there are many ready to use general purpose distributions like Ubuntu, Redhat, CentOS etc which are available in server configurations, and can be installed to perform the functions of a fileserver, but with a lot of tweaking. There are some ready to use linux based NAS distributions too, which have been stripped off to contain only the tweaked kernel, servers (NFS, CIFS, iSCSI targets, etc), and other related filesystem utilities. They have been tweaked heavily, and can be further done so, to act as a fileserver. They also contain custom opensource software written for managing storage. Some of the examples are NASLite, and Openfiler which offers a complete management web server. Or we can always start from scratch with linux, adding just the required device drivers, servers and tools. But that is going to take an eon, however. I would also suggest taking the OS off the harddisk and put it completely on a Ramdisk, thus making performance comparable to the firmware based proprietary OSes. The memories spend for it is well worth the performance improvement.
Finally, Mr. X decided to use openfiler because of its many features, and further tweak it as necessary. Morover, its development and support seems pretty decent, and it seems to be the best in open source. There is a lot of room for performance tweaks, but it is possible only after the fileserver is assembled.
Display and Audio: Not really an important factor in a fileserver configuration, now is it? The Tyan Thunder n3600B (S2927) motherboard has onboard display chip and audio, if you want the occasional luxury ;).
Management Softwares: Openfiler provided a wide variety of management tools, including snapshots! All the fileserver features are available in a web interface, greatly simplifying configuration and management. All services like NFS, CIFS, user configuration, group configuration, LDAP, NIS, Samba, quotas, snapshots and much more can be configured by the Openfiler Web Interface. Check it out – www.openfiler.org

Down with the theory now. Let’s build an official configuration list now:
Some of the “great” features of the products that we have used in this configuration are here:

3ware 9650SE RAID Controller
8th-generation StorSwitch™ non-blocking switched architecture
On-board I/O RISC processor and RAID offload
SCSI device driver model
Bootable array support
Variable stripe size
64-bit LBA support (greater than 2TB volume)
256 MB DDR2 533 memory with ECC protection
32 pooled DMA channels
Complete configuration management suite - 3ware BIOS Manager 3ware Disk Manager ,CLI
SNMP support
SMTP support for email/pager notification
Auto carving allows LUNs > 2TB
Battery Backup Unit (BBU) support
Multiple logical unit sizes and RAID levels on one card
Hot-swap and hot-spare support
Dynamic sector repair
S.M.A.R.T. disk drive monitoring
Emergency Flash Recovery
Online Capacity Expansion and RAID Level Migration
Write journaling for improved performance and data protection against accidental drive removal
Chassis Control Unit for enclosure management via I2C
RoHS compliant

Intel® PRO/1000 PT Quad Port Server Adapter
Two Intel® 82571GB Gigabit Controllers
Load balancing on multiple CPUs
Intel® I/OAT2
Virtualization, Interrupt moderation
PCI Express slots
Remote management support
RoHS compliant
Advanced cable diagnostics

Tyan Thunder n3600B (S2927) Motherboard
Processor - Dual 1207-pin sockets support AMD Opteron™ (Rev. F) 2000 series processors
1 GHz Hyper-Transport link support
Chipset - nVIDIA NFP3600, SMSC SCH5017
Memory - Dual channel memory bus 8 x 240-pin ECC DDR2 400/533/667 DIMM, up to 32GB
Expansion Slots - PCI-E x16 (x 16 signals), PCI-E x16 (x 8 signals), PCI v2.3 32-bit/33MHz slots
Integrated PCI Graphics
Integrated PCI IDE
6 x SATA2 3.0Gb/s ports
Monitoring - Temperature & voltage monitoring, Watchdog timer support, Port 80 code display LED
Two integrated GbE ports
PCI FireWire (1394) controller
Two 1394 ports
Optional Modules - M3291, IPMI 2.0 Remote System Mgmt. card
BIOS - AMI BIOS on 8Mbit Flash, Supports ACPI 2.0PnP, DMI 2.0, WfM 2.0
Form Factor - ATX footprint

AMD Opteron Processor
AMD Opteron 2212 2.0 GHz
NUMA Architecture
Direct Connect Architecture
Socket F, 1207 pin
AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology
Dual-core design

Supermicro SuperChassis 745TQ-800
Form Factor - Tower / 4U chassis support.
Dimensions
178mm x 452mm x 648mm
Gross Weight - 58 lbs (26.3kg)
Expansion Slots - 7x PCI expansion slots
Drive Bays - Hot-swap - 8x 3.5" Hot-swap (SAS / SATA) Drive Bays
Peripheral Bay(s) - 2x 5.25" Peripheral Drive Bay, 1x 5.25" Bay For Floppy Drive
SAS / SATA Hard Drive Backplane with SES2
System Cooling - 3x 5000 RPM, 2x 5000 RPM Rear Exhaust Cooling Fans, Hot-Swappable
System Monitoring - Chassis intrusion switch
Operating Temperature Range - 10 - 35°C (50° to 95° F)
Humidity Range - 8 - 90% non-condensing
Power Supply - 800W AC power supply w/ PFC
AC Voltage - 100 - 240V, 50-60Hz, 10-4 A

+5V standby - 04 A

+12V - 66 A

+5V - 30 A

+3.3V - 24 A

-12V - 0.6 A

Proceed to the next part