amuck-landowner

Hardware Porn (aka our new backups node)

Francisco

Francisco

Company Lube
Verified Provider
Hello everyone,

I just noticed that I didn't post this over here so, enjoy!

For the past week I've been in Vegas upgrading our storage nodes, getting the last few OVZ nodes swapped to pure

SSD's, as well as building out this beast of a chassis for the free backups & snapshots we announced.

Pretty annoying to build (namely the single SATA plug each instead of an expander connector).

- Single L5520 CPU

- 72GB RAM

- 3 x 500GB SSD's (all for caching of some sorts)

- 24 x 4TB WD RED's

- Supermicro 4U 24 bay chassis

Alas, since this is an older revision of the chassis it doesn't have proper slots for 2.5" drives (the SSD's). Fear not, double

sided foam tape works perfectly for this!

This isn't the 'complete' pictures and after this cleaned up the cables a bit more with some more straps. The power supply is quite large so there's no easy way to tuck the cables away, though.

We expect to have backups/snapshots in limited beta sometime this/next weekend. It really comes down to how many days I sleep in a row once I get home :p

Note: My internet is really terrible in this hotel so if there's an actual "hardware porn" thread, I apologize. Please merge it!

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Francisco
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Francisco

Francisco

Company Lube
Verified Provider
texteditor said:
L5520 + 72GB RAM....is it transplant from one of those off-lease ex-'cloud' systems on ebay?

edit:
Click to expand...
Nah, they use 4GB sticks to get to 72GB.

The L5520 was pulled from our rigs a year or so ago when we moved everything to L5638+ processors.

The Ebay boxes are all dells, where as this is all supermicro. The board is an X8DTN+-F, which has 18 RAM slots.

I need RAM for our platform more than anything else.

It is a dual board, though, so down the road I can add a 2nd half if need be for minimal cost (pretty much just the admin cost for FH to install it).

We'll be doing a RAID7 for it so we'll have ~80TB usable.

Francisco
 
MannDude

MannDude

Just a dude
vpsBoard Founder
Moderator
Sweet upgrades. I'd rather see more providers upgrade their stuff and offer actual good services than just increase RAM allocation for the same price.

"Business is slow? What do we do?"

-- "Fuck it... lets sell 4GB of RAM for our new offer, for $7... no, wait... $6.95/mo. Yeah, mmmm..."

Fran's approach:

"Hmm, need to stay competitive. I know, I'll dump $50,000+ in SSD drives, give free upgrades, and then get new backup storage up. Yeah, that'll do."

I still don't understand why you're not charging something more reasonable for backups. Certainly a service worth paying for. But customers won't complain at it being free (or almost-free, forget what you chose)
 
Aldryic C'boas

Aldryic C'boas

The Pony
Insight to our madness:

12:08:10 <&Francisco> i swear to god someone is whistling the mocking jay song from hunger games >_>
12:08:38 <&Aldryic> ahahahaha
12:08:41 <&Aldryic> you're losing it, boss :p
12:11:03 < bzImage> You're lucky you dont have a cell that works in the US
12:11:12 < bzImage> I would totally call you and whistle the tetris theme
12:11:18 <&Francisco> hahaha
12:11:18 <&Aldryic> bahahaha
12:11:22 <&Francisco> i kinda wish i did
12:11:27 <&Francisco> so i could chat to people while on the DC floor
12:11:35 <&Aldryic> Let's call Rob and ask if he has a PA system <_<
12:11:42 <&Aldryic> Fran - should've just dropped like 30$ on a prepaid
12:11:45 <&Aldryic> used that for the trip
12:11:55 <&Francisco> ald - it would have been a good idea for sure but i'm a jew
12:12:16 <&Francisco> free upgrades to everyone at no cost? check.
12:12:20 <&Francisco> $30 cell card? too expensive
Click to expand...
 
Francisco

Francisco

Company Lube
Verified Provider
Let me get the prep work done for the storage & addons nodes and then I'll snag them. I'm quickly putting together everything.

The biggest issue is that I have to sit around cleaning off the old thermal pads.

Thankfully I should have all of these boards done in the next little bit.

Francisco
 
Francisco

Francisco

Company Lube
Verified Provider
MannDude said:
Fran's approach:

"Hmm, need to stay competitive. I know, I'll dump $50,000+ in SSD drives, give free upgrades, and then get new backup storage up. Yeah, that'll do."

I still don't understand why you're not charging something more reasonable for backups. Certainly a service worth paying for. But customers won't complain at it being free (or almost-free, forget what you chose)
Click to expand...
The original idea behind backups was to charge for them. Coincidentally, during the time that we were discussion costs and such, we had a handful of customers rage at us because they managed to rm their own files and never had their own backups.

In the end, we're eating the cost of it on all 256MB+ plans save people from themselves :)

Francisco
 
W

willie

Active Member
Wow, I want one of those-- just put LVM across all 24 drives, sell it as a KVM storage plan, and I'm all over it ;)

Those 500GB caching SSD's, are those EVO drives like the ones user files are on?  :O

By RAID7 do you mean this? http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel7-c.html

Does that mean a hw raid controller from that specific brand? 

Given the cost of user storage on SSD's, having HDD backup seems like a great idea.  Relatively low incremental cost and gives people moar peace of mind.

Nice jorb!
 
Francisco

Francisco

Company Lube
Verified Provider
willie said:
Wow, I want one of those-- just put LVM across all 24 drives, sell it as a KVM storage plan, and I'm all over it ;)

Those 500GB caching SSD's, are those EVO drives like the ones user files are on?  :eek:

By RAID7 do you mean this? http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel7-c.html

Does that mean a hw raid controller from that specific brand? 

Given the cost of user storage on SSD's, having HDD backup seems like a great idea.  Relatively low incremental cost and gives people moar peace of mind.

Nice jorb!
Click to expand...
I'm keeping the RAID setup to myself for now ;)

We use 1TB EVO's in all the OpenVZ nodes. Each OpenVZ node has 8 1TB EVO's in RAID10 using an adaptec 7805 for the raid card.

These drives are just 500GB ADATA ones.

They're just for read caches and such so it's not a big deal if it died.

We do have RAID1 setup for some of the caching, though.

Francisco
 
drmike

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
So, 3 SSDs + 1 spinning disk Rambo mounted style then 24 drives in the real bays?

Real clean and tight installation.

"namely the single SATA plug each instead of an expander connector"

Why did you opt for a controller that required the per channel cable instead of the expander connector?
 
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