An Introduction to Clustering

How to build a Petabyte cluster using GlusterFS

with ZFS running on Storinator massive storage servers 

 

If you checked out our recent video on clustering, you may have seen me keep a high-speed file transfer going, while I did just about everything I could think of that would give a system administrator nightmares. I was pulling out drives, yanking out network cables and hitting the power switch (virtually) on a server. This robustness is one of the key features of a storage cluster.

In this blog, I'm going to give you an overview of how we built that cluster, along with tons of detail on how I configured it. I'm hoping that when you see what I did, you'll see that clustering technology has improved and simplified to the point where even very small organizations can build affordable storage solutions that are incredibly robust and massively scalable.

Everything you Need to Know about Hard Drive Vibration

Hard Disk Drives (HDD's) are one of the most impressive and important electromechanical devices ever created. When I think about it, it is really amazing that these things actually work, let alone work so well!  These disks must quickly and precisely position heads slightly above very narrow tracks on rapidly spinning platters. If there is an error in the angular position of the head, it will not be positioned above the correct sector and therefore cannot correctly read or write data. 

How to Tune a NAS for Direct-from-Server Editing of 5K Video

At 45 Drives, we make really large capacity storage servers. When we first started out, our machines were relatively slow, and focused on cold-to-lukewarm storage applications; but our users pushed us to achieve more performance and reliability. This drove the evolution of our direct-wired architecture, which delivers enterprise level speed (read/write in excess of 3 Gigabytes/second) and reliability, without losing the simplicity and price point. 

All this extra speed made our Storinator servers highly suitable for a number of new applications, one of which is video editing. This field has seen its storage needs explode in recent years, and hugely benefit from our incredible capacity and density. Organizations have used them to centralize their storage, but the speed has opened up a whole new opportunity, namely to edit directly from the central server, rather than download and work off of internal hard drives. This saves time formerly required for transferring files to and from the workstation, but also can take place at a performance level higher than can be achieved from a single local drive (mechanical or SSD).

Redundant FreeNAS Boot Drives on the Storinator!

At 45 Drives, the FreeNAS network attached storage operating system is a popular choice to run our high performance massive storage pods. It combines the advantages of the modern ZFS copy on write file system, with the simplicity of a purpose-built GUI driven NAS appliance shell.

Until today, whenever a customer received a Storinator running FreeNAS it would be configured with a bootable single USB stick that held the FreeNAS OS, and two SSDs configured as a backup of your FreeNAS configuration. In the unlikely event that the boot stick died, you simply had to plug in a new one (which could be created using the instructions and image on our wiki), and copy the configuration, and you're up and going again.

But a number of customers requested that we ship our FreeNAS Storinator pods with a mirrored install of FreeNAS directly on the SSDs, and use the USB stick as the NAS configuration backup. I have to admit, it really did make a lot of sense to me, so we did it!

Essentially we are flipping the old setup upside down. Instead of a single install backing up to mirrored devices we have a mirrored install backing up to a single USB.

ADVANTAGES

We feel that this new set-up has a couple advantages over the old way.

• FreeNAS will boot faster.
• FreeNAS is quite verbose during its start up, and combined with the slow throughput of the USB stick, booting up the pod took ages compared to today's world where SSD boot drives are taking over.
• FreeNAS is safer.
• FreeNAS is designed so that one boot SSD can fail while its mirror keeps you up and running. You simply pop in a new SSD, and once the mirror is rebuilt, you are protected again. So this gives you maximum uptime.  
• PLUS your configuration is still being backed up! This could come in handy if you experience catastrophic failure of both SSDs, or the ever present risk of human error.
• For more info on the Configuration Backup, check out our wiki.

EXISTING CUSTOMERS

For existing customers running FreeNAS that want to use the new set up discussed here, have no fear, as you can switch over and be up and running like nothing happened in about 30 minutes!

The complete process will be outlined on our wiki: HERE.

But here's a quick overview:

1. Migrate all your config backups to somewhere not on the NAS, as we have to blow out the SSDs
2. Follow our OS restoration procedure to install FreeNAS onto one of the SSDs.
3. Plug in the freshly restored SSD the second SSD and the USB thumb drive. Ideally, get a separate USB stick than your current boot device just to be safe. It should be at least 4GB.
4. Boot into FreeNAS, attach the second SSD to create a mirror and then create a pool called “backup” using the USB thumb drive.
5. Import your storage pool(s) and then upload your old configuration.
6. Get back to work!

Thank you for continually providing feedback on how we can improve our products for you, our customers. We take pride in listening to our customers, so if you have any other suggestions on how we can make our products more efficient for you, please don't hesitate to send us an email! 

Guest Post- "Finding the Right NAS Operating System - If There is Just One"

Thomas Kay founded Tom's Computer Support in 2001 with the goal of providing the type of professional IT support larger companies enjoy to small businesses in Pennsylvania.  Applying his experience working in marketing, sales, as well as IT at many local companies, Thomas quickly built a reputation as being a knowledgeable and trustworthy IT industry expert. He shares his expertise on a range of current IT topics via his blog at tomscomputersupport.com. Watch this space over the next few weeks as Thomas chronicles his experience building out his NAS using a Storinator from 45 Drives.

GUEST POST: Thomas Kay's first blog post explained how his new 45 Drives Storinator is more than capable of solving the painful problem of storage expansion. In his latest blog post , Thomas discusses the options for finding the right NAS operating system for his new 45 Drives hardware. Check out the article that gives an in-depth look at the criteria involved with choosing the right NAS OS and a look at the pros and cons between using the different OS options that are available.

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Guest Post - "The Problem of Storage"

Thomas Kay founded Tom's Computer Support in 2001 with the goal of providing the type of professional IT support larger companies enjoy to small businesses in Pennsylvania.  Applying his experience working in marketing, sales, as well as IT at many local companies, Thomas quickly built a reputation as being a knowledgeable and trustworthy IT industry expert. He shares his expertise on a range of current IT topics via his blog at tomscomputersupport.com. Watch this space over the next few weeks as Thomas chronicles his experience building out his NAS using a Storinator from 45 Drives.

GUEST POST: Thomas Kay, founder of Tom's Computer Support, brings his expertise to the 45 Drives Blog by discussing the challenge IT professionals face when balancing the accessibility of content for our users, while also managing the storage needs of the organization in a manner that is fiscally responsible. In his first article, Thomas discusses how the 45 Drives Storinator solves this painful problem of storage expansion.

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