What hardware to get for a good, and big, file server?

[Tsuroerusu]

Okay here's the deal, I basicly am very tired of running out of disk space every other month, so I wanna pretty much eliminate those limits and also create a very flexible and expandable storage solution for myself, where I can just add in another drive when needed.

What I imagined would be something like a 14 x drive RAID-5 array with one or two Opteron CPUs from AMD (Opterons are dirt cheap these days, so getting two isn't really that expensive) running Linux, maybe even an enterprise distro (I'm actually intriegued to buy a license for one, because I really like seeing exactly what businesses are using, and get some first hand experience with it myself).

I'm curious about what motherboard, RAM and disk controllers I should be looking for, what I imagined was adding a PCI-X based disk controller to the system to a bunch of RAID options. The reason I might be going with RAID-5 is that I will have one big disk drive and also protection against them starting to fail.

This may seem very extreme considering it's only for myself, but I have this dream of becomming a super hardcore system/network administrator, and first hand experience is gold, and using hardware and software that corporations use allows me to get experience that I might not be able to get by just setting up an old AMD Athlon XP box with some IDE drives and stuff.

[Gomer_X]

As far as buying an enterprise distro goes, you can do that if you want, but Centos is a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's built from the same sources and gets the same updates. It's exactly the same except for no Red Hat name or logos. I'm sure there are similar versions of other enterprise distros available.

For hardware, what Google told me when I was doing my research is buy SATA cards for disk controllers. You can buy 4 port cards, that will hold 8 drives, but you only want 1 drive per port if you care about speed. Linux software RAID seems to work, or if you want to spend a lot of money, you can get real hardware RAID cards. Just do your research because a lot of RAID cards actually do the RAID in software.

That's about all I know. Hopefully someone who knows more will give better info.

[snarkout]

My workstation is RAID5 using a 3ware SATA card since it was the cheapest hardware solution I could find -- there are much better cards, but you pay for what you get. It's the 4 port card, but you can get many more ports, the price climbs quickly though. SCSI is a better choice, generally, but costs a lot more. If you really want the uber-option, get a hot-swap cage. All of this get into the multi-thousand dollar range before you have anything besides drives though.

[Tsuroerusu]

As far as buying an enterprise distro goes, you can do that if you want, but Centos is a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I've never been a fan of Red Hat, I havn't noticed a decent "disk manager" anywhere outside the installation, I like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server a lot better, and it's not as expensive as Red Hat.

[Gomer_X]

I've never been a fan of Red Hat, I havn't noticed a decent "disk manager" anywhere outside the installation, I like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server a lot better, and it's not as expensive as Red Hat.

I'm not sure what you mean by "disk manager." It's OK not to be a Red Hat fan, though. I first tried it at version 5.2 and am too old to change.

My point was you can get "Enterprise" for free in a lot of cases. I'll pat you on the back for paying for it, though. Might as well give support whenever we can.

[Tsuroerusu]

I've never been a fan of Red Hat, I havn't noticed a decent "disk manager" anywhere outside the installation, I like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server a lot better, and it's not as expensive as Red Hat.

I'm not sure what you mean by "disk manager." It's OK not to be a Red Hat fan, though. I first tried it at version 5.2 and am too old to change.

My point was you can get "Enterprise" for free in a lot of cases. I'll pat you on the back for paying for it, though. Might as well give support whenever we can.

By disk manager I meant a utility that allows me to quickly change mount points, partition and format new drives... and stuff like that, a perfect example of this would be the Partitioner in SUSE's YaST.

In general I find SUSE's management utilities vastly surperior to Red Hat's, you know a lot of people often discuss why businesses should choose Red Hat over SUSE or SUSE over Red Hat, and I prefer SUSE because I just like the product better.

Thanks for the pat, as I've said before I actually prefer paying for free software ("free" as in "freedom") rather than proprietary software, and why? Because I get "the four essential freedoms" that RMS always speaks of

[Gomer_X]

I'm not sure what you mean by "disk manager." It's OK not to be a Red Hat fan, though. I first tried it at version 5.2 and am too old to change.

By disk manager I meant a utility that allows me to quickly change mount points, partition and format new drives... and stuff like that, a perfect example of this would be the Partitioner in SUSE's YaST.

In general I find SUSE's management utilities vastly surperior to Red Hat's, you know a lot of people often discuss why businesses should choose Red Hat over SUSE or SUSE over Red Hat, and I prefer SUSE because I just like the product better.

I haven't seen a tool like than on Red Hat distros either. There used to be a tool where you could mount and unmount partitions, but the mounts had to be set up in /etc/fstab already. I think it was a Gnome app.

I guess you're expected to do this stuff from the command line. That works for me, but I think we're getting to the point where admins don't have that kind of experience and need graphical tools. That's certainly a complaint I've heard over and over when people talk about Windows administration versus Linux.

[treehead]

(I'm actually intriegued to buy a license for one, because I really like seeing exactly what businesses are using, and get some first hand experience with it myself).

;me too. i'm glad that i'm not the only one.

As far as buying an enterprise distro goes, you can do that if you want, but Centos is a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's built from the same sources and gets the same updates. It's exactly the same except for no Red Hat name or logos. I'm sure there are similar versions of other enterprise distros available....

+1 Informative

;i had no idea.

... I guess you're expected to do this stuff from the command line. That works for me, but I think we're getting to the point where admins don't have that kind of experience and need graphical tools. That's certainly a complaint I've heard over and over when people talk about Windows administration versus Linux.[/url]

"always use bash, grasshoppa... keep your foo quick!"

;treehead

[Tsuroerusu]

Something I like about Novell's offerings is that they offer a full 30-day trial on the stuff you get if you go out and buy a license for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, I think I wanna get a good book about administering a SUSE system and just read that over 30 days when they release SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. Might be a fun thing to do, damn there's a lot of book I want these days!