Now that I'm holed up in the house indefinitely, I have time to work on projects that have been stalled for quite a while. As is often the case, my projects are often part of a larger vision. Documenting these projects here will be my way of sharing them with my fellow SILUG members, and maybe suggesting new ideas to the group. The first big project is my storage server. With cloud storage so freely available, you may wonder why I would bother with this at all. Just like the saying that goes "there's no free lunch", cloud storage has a number of vulnerabilities that many people don't think of when they're just getting started. First and foremost, you're sending personal and private information off into the network somewhere that you really have no way to evaluate its trustworthiness or reliability. These companies offer no long term guarantees of service. If they go out of business for any reason (acquisition or bankruptcy), your data is gone. Most do not offer any way to recover your information, particularly if you have any serious volume at all. If it took you months to upload it, it would take months to recover it. So consider a local storage server. I personally like the products from the company that built servers for one of the original commercial cloud storage services, Rackspace. It's called 45drives.com and they're located in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada. They're actually two companies working together: Protocase and 45drives. Protocase is a CAD-based metal bender that makes custom enclosures. 45drives builds specialty servers in those enclosures using mostly off-the-shelf components. Their mainline storage server is called the Storinator. It's physically divided into two sections. The front is essentially a PC with an ATX motherboard and a custom power supply in a 19" 4U case. The back contains rows of fifteen 3.5" SATA drive slots. These are arranged vertically rather like Pop-Tart toaster pastry slots. The original server evolved into what they now call the Storinator S45. It has three rows of fifteen drives, hence the company nanme 45drives.com. There have been three new models released, the Storinator 15, 30, and 60. They differ only in the numbers of drive rows (1, 2, or 4), and obviously their physical size & weight. The baseline AV15 model would probably be the initial starting point for many. With no "payload" drives, it can be purchased off the web for $2,735: Mine would be called their S45-Base model. In a bare-bones configuration it can be purchased for $7,722.33: Note that my model includes three LSI 9305 host adapters each capable of supporting 12 SATA drives. Earlier versions of the Storinator used two Rocket 750 host adapters each capable of supporting 24 SATA drives. They had to replace the Rocket 750s with LSI 9305s because there is no CentOS 8 driver for the Rocket 750. As the web pages indicate, 45drives will custom build a Storinator to suit your needs. In the next installment, I'll discuss several of those potential alternative choices, including what payload drives you may want to buy. I will also discuss a CentOS 8 setup in detail. --Doc Savage Fairview Heights, IL |