I jumped the gun on the storage server project. Decided to just go for it. And guess what? It's done! Pomf is on the new server right now!

There's 6 16TB Seagate Exos X18 drives in there. Not cheap. More expensive than the server itself, actually. But Pomf is now running on 10GbE backed storage, with 2 parity disks, and a crap ton of available storage. Look at it all!

For those not in the know, this is a TrueNAS server, serving iSCSI LUNs to my main compute servers. All three servers have access to this storage server over dedicated 10GbE. The storage server has 128GB of RAM, 20 cores, a 64G RAID1 SLOG drive, and a 320GB L2 read cache. It's wicked fast.

Also! You might have noticed Pomf runs a little better now. I found some performance issues that were throttling the OpenVPN links between Pomf and the edge nodes, and I also increased the edge caches by 8x. Now 1TB of data can sit out there, ready to go for immediate delivery.

Also! All VMs that were not on ESXi3 (the super fast, dual PSU server) are now on shared storage, meaning if a tower dies (local storage, PSU, whatever), that VM will just boot on another available server automatically. Full HA is now possible with this storage server, which itself has strong parity and redundancy baked in.

Also! I bought ANOTHER server, an R720xd, to use as a unified backup target. It will be the same idea as the storage server, but with less cores and RAM, and 6 8TB WD Reds instead. This is a huge upgrade from "USB docks with shitty SATA controllers". That will be installed in just a few days. All the parts are here except the server itself.

Lots of happenings lately! Always happy to play with new gear. And it is finally getting cold, which is when my servers really shine (by heating my whole house).

-7666

 

 

Bonus Image - the giant bundle of cables that carry data/power between my servers and switch closet. This article was served through that.