[OpenIndiana-discuss] Low low end server

[Volker A. Brandt]

> I looked at a HP N54L today: Costs nothing, but actually handles ECC
> memory. Albeit very slow memory, and not very much.
>
> So, would it be reasonable to set this guy up with 4 2TB SATA disks,
> 8GB 800MHz ECC memory and run some Illumos based version with ZFS.

Yes.  Note that you could also put in 2x 8GB = 16 GB.  I am not
really sure what you mean by "very slow".  I use Kingston PC3-10600
CL9 ECC 8 GB DIMMs.

> I was thinking of putting two 2.5" small boot disks (300GB???) using
> some adapter in the optical drive slot, and 4 2TB disks in a raidz
> to provide 6TB of storage with medium availability performance.

Do you really need the mirrored boot?

> Would this work??

Yes, altough you would have to find a sixth SATA connector for
the second small boot disk, or you would have to loop the eSATA
port back inside the case.

> Would the performance be good enough to be a home
> cloud server for media and/or documents?

Yes.

> Is Nexenta or OmniOS or SMARTOS better or easier to deply than
> OpenIndiana for this setup?

I am using OmniOS, with a 128 GB Samsung SSD as boot and cache, and
four 3TB disks in the four slots:

<nfs:/tmp,1597> cat /etc/release
  OmniOS v11 r151006
  Copyright 2012-2013 OmniTI Computer Consulting, Inc. All rights reserved.
  Use is subject to license terms.
<nfs:/tmp,1598> zpool list -v
NAME         SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  EXPANDSZ    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
dpool       5.44T  2.67T  2.77T         -    49%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
  mirror    2.72T  1.33T  1.39T         -
    c1t0d0      -      -      -         -
    c1t2d0      -      -      -         -
  mirror    2.72T  1.33T  1.39T         -
    c1t1d0      -      -      -         -
    c1t3d0      -      -      -         -
cache           -      -      -      -      -      -
  c1t5d0s6  87.1G  3.36M  87.1G         -
rpool         32G  8.87G  23.1G         -    27%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
  c1t5d0s0    32G  8.87G  23.1G         -


Easy to deploy (except the "slice the SSD up into rpool and cache"
bit). Works very well.


Regards -- Volker
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Volker A. Brandt               Consulting and Support for Oracle Solaris
Brandt & Brandt Computer GmbH                   WWW: http://www.bb-c.de/
Am Wiesenpfad 6, 53340 Meckenheim, GERMANY            Email: vab at bb-c.de
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