Monday, March 28, 2011

It's Time for a new Home Server

So after over 10 years of non stop operation (baring relocation and upgrades) it's finally time to move my home server to a new platform and join the rush to the integrated home IT solution.

My current workhorse is a Fedora server running on a generic reasonably fast motherboard with a 3ware IDE raid controller and 3 140gb drives in raid 5. The current drives have been running continuously for nearly 7 years and give my around 280gb of usable storage. The server is also my Linux play toy running various scripts and enduring my tinkering it's even had a Signiant agent installed on it as part of a proof of concept test for work. Overall, it's been a solid platform, even surviving the 3 months of relocation from Hong Kong to the UK and a stint at sea in a container.




So it's time to move on and look at what else is out there and where I can go taking my home IT infrastructure "to the next level". The House itself is ready. When it was built, it had multiple cat 5E installed to pretty much every room with a central RG45 patch bay in the study. It's a little OTT, some rooms have 3 pairs of cables and 3 RF cables too (I will get around to terminating them one day)




So what do I want my new server to provide?

  1. It has to be fast enough to stream video (SD for sure, HD would be nice)
  2. It has to be resilient so we are talking hardware raid for both the storage and the OS (raid 5 please)
  3. I want all that DLNA has to offer, (I currently have a Roku soundbridge and a DLNA friendly Bluray) 
  4. I need it to be able to manage my backups to Amazon S3
  5. It has to be somewhere around 4TB usable storage but with the option to expand
  6. It has to be expandable with lots of ports of all sorts
  7. It has to have a 3rd party community to create plug ins and hacks to keep me tinkering.
This is not too much to ask is it?

So what is out there? Currently based on cruising the net there are basically three ways to go.

  1. Builds a server and stick on linux and lots of other modules to make it work for me (what I have already)
  2. Buy a ready to go box such as a Lacie Big5 or Netgear ReadyNAS with a customised version of a unixish OS and stuff it full of disks (I did this too but the hardware broke)
  3. Buy or build a server and run Microsoft Home Server
 oops, did I forget "buy a Mac", I would rather sniff a Yak's armpit.

Looking at the list of options above, I have really done option 1 and 2 already and while option 1 could deliver everything I want with a lot of fiddling with software, I have really done this already and want to try something different. Option 2 would make me lock this server into a single manufacturers solution  and would not give me the ability to add option cards or upgrade the disk controller etc. This server would not be able to grow and expand due to it's fixed hardware configuration. I would also be locked into to an extent to the servers community for new software modules and feature support.

The last option, and the one that I will go for is to run a Microsoft Home Server system, but opt to build the hardware for it to run on.

Whilst it may seem that I am selling out my Linux roots, after looking around, this server has massive appeal in that it seems to be at the front end of the connected home solution, supporting all sorts of cool features (some I didn't even think of) and has a good aftermarket 3rd party community building all sorts of interesting plugins.

I could actually buy a server ready to go such as one of the Lacie Big5 models, the Acer H310 of the HP Media Vault range (soon to be discontinued) but there is one big issue. WHS version one uses a module called the Disk Extender. this allows the WHS server to take all available hard drives and build an aggregate pool of storage (sort of a Raid 0). As with Raid 0, this storage pool in its basic form has no resilience and fails to meet one of my primary requirements. The disk extender does allow you to replicate designated folders across different physical drives however, providing a sort of Raid 1 at a folder level. This would protect your data but to protect all you data, you would loose 50% of your usable disk capacity. Another issue for me is that it seems you cannot use this folder replication feature to protect the OS partition, so your boot drive would remain unprotected.

From my research, none of the WHS server in a box solutions offered hardware raid. Forum traffic however has indicated that WHS will run on top of hardware raid so this is an option if I build my own.

So this is my mission! Build a nice and expandable server with hardware raid and run WHS.

In my next post will cover my hardware purchases

1 comment:

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