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.

As a doctoral student, one of your first tasks is to identify a problem in the business world and then perform research on how to solve that issue. As an IT professional, we are generally solving problems on a daily basis. One of the more fun jobs in IT is that of how to maintain accessibility of content for our users while managing the storage needs of the organization in a manner that is fiscally responsible. This concept becomes an interesting balancing act and as many IT professionals know, SANs, NAS Appliances, and other means of storage aren’t exactly inexpensive, but unfortunately they are part of doing business.

This article is the start of many to come that revolve around my newest data center addition: The 45Drives Storinator!

For many of you that have seen my data center in the past, it has evolved from several QNAP Servers such as the TS-509 Pro with eSata external storage into a single TS-809U-RP+ and then into multiple TS-809 series units. Finally, for the past two years, my data center has been using a custom server with a Norco 24 bay case (RPC-4224) powered by an Asus DGPE-D16 with dual AMD 16 core processors, 128GB DDR3 Registered ECC RAM, and an Areca Technologies raid controller. Over time, the server has become less and less stable – for whatever reason.

Ultimately though, the real reason of obtaining the 45 Drives Storinator is to hopefully solve the painful problem of storage expansion.

Storage Expansion

When I first started out with my QNAP TS-509, their firmware only supported the options of true RAID configured volumes. Meaning – They were hard set to a specific method of redundancy. If you populated the devices, like I did, with all the bays being used, you probably selected either RAID 5 or 6 for single parity, single drive redundancy or dual redundancy, respectively. The problem became that you would be locked into whatever storage space you had from day one, or you would have to migrate all the data off to a backup, then restore to a new set of disks had you wanted to expand your storage allotment. In my case, I added an external eSATA expander to expand my storage allotment. This became a major administration problem and the idea was retired.

It was then that I migrated to a set of dual TS-809s so that I would be able to better manage the storage, but this became a problem because the pool of storage disks was separate and I ended up under allocating storage on device #1 and underutilized device #2.

In the real world of medium and small businesses, storage requirements for many is an unknown variable. One doesn’t know how much storage they will actually need from month to month or remotely from year to year. So how does a business purchase a unit like the old series TS-509 and TS-809 units with the expectation of really utilizing it? Generally speaking, they probably filled it with the best bang for the buck drive at the time and hope that they actually use it, or they filled it for what they needed at the time and then they expanded on it later if they had slots remaining.

Today, QNAP, Synology, and many other vendors, have allowed us new features such as storage pools that allow us to add and manage a mix set of drive sizes (much like a drobo) into a pool and create virtual volumes from that pool of drives. This allows us to set different RAID levels as needed based on what the need of that volume is.

Costs of Storage Management

My problem with many of these storage solutions like the Synology systems and QNAP devices is that they charge a premium for a device that uses security vulnerable software and limited number of bays which ultimately means less expansion capabilities. Enter the competition: 45 Drives Storinator! This guy is built of industry reliable hardware that is housed in a uniquely homebrew-like computer chassis but with far more expansion than the competition. Take a look at the numbers:

Description	Option 1	Option 2	Option 3	Option 4	Option 5
Manufacturer	45 Drives	45 Drives	QNAP	QNAP	Synology
Model Number	Storinator S45 Turbo	Storinator S45lite	TVS-EC2480U-SAS-RP	TS-EC2480U-RP	RS18016xs+
Number of Drive Bays in Main Unit	45	45	24	24	12
Price of Main Unit	$8,411.57	$4,435.37	$8,999.99	7099.99	$7,599.99
Expansion Unit Model Number	NA	NA	REXP-1620U-RP	REXP-1620U-RP	RX1216sas
Number of Drive Bays in Expansion Unit	0	$0.00	16	16	12
Number of Expansion Units	0	$0.00	1	1	3
Expansion Unit Price	0	$0.00	$3,799.99	$3,799.99	2972.99
Total Price	$8,412	$4,435	$12,800	$10,900	$16,518.96
Total Number of Bays	45	45	40	40	48
Price Per Bay	$186.92	$98.56	$533.33	$454.17	$344.15

This table uses all the purchase prices as of 12/4/2015 from reputable suppliers (not ebay) and does not include any hard drives for the units. I tried to get the specs as comparable as possible from one manufacturer to another. As you can see, hands down, the Storinator can easily win the per bay pricing war over other manufacturers. Many will argue here the 45 Drives unit is not designed to compete with the NAS units of these manufacturers, but if you look at the models from the competition, they all use SAS connectivity and offer 10Gb network connections, which – to me – put them in the enterprise level of product.

Expansion

As you can see from the table above, each of the primary manufacturers that I looked to compare to have options to expand on the primary chassis and retain single pain of glass administration. Although the Storinator does not currently have that option, I can see that option being something easily accomplishable since it is based on simple HBA adapter design that are industry standard. That being said, one could purchase a second 45 drives unit and daisy chain it to the first using an HBA expander and external controller on the first in order to retain centralized administration.

Keep in mind that the numbers above are represented as all upfront purchases to keep them in line with purchasing a 45 drives unit with 45 bays, but for many organizations, and the purpose of this blog article, many organizations don’t realize that they need that many drives.

Drive Selection and Population

Let’s be realistic and say that you just purchased your first 45 drives unit, do you really expect to populate all 45 bays with 8TB or 10TB helium drives in order to get the most amount of storage possible from the unit on day one? At $29,386 for 45 drives of 8TB HGST’s, a small or medium business probably won’t do that. So – Let’s understand how real drive storage typically works. An IT administrator will purchase an 8 bay NAS appliance, purchase the largest drives that he possibly can at reasonable prices, and only populate the number of bays that are required to store the data that the company needs at that particular moment. In other words, he would probably purchase four 6TB Red NAS drives and run them in RAID 5. A few months later, or year later, the IT administrator will notice that he needs more space, and may purchase 8TB RED Nas drives, and populate them into 2 of the open bays in order to give space to the unit. What’s the problem?

With typical units that only allow for regular RAID configurations, the administrator would be faced with only being able to utilize 6TB from the 8TB drives, configure the 8TB drives in RAID 1 as a separate volume, or look at other options. With new QNAP firmware, he could use storage pools and virtual volumes to configure his space allocation appropriately.

My Project

Stay tuned for how I’ll be utilizing my Storinator over the next few weeks. I’ll initially be looking at using the Open Source software package: Xpenology (which uses similar software as Synology) for my chassis, but will most likely end up using Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with Storage Spaces. I’ll get into the reasons later when I expand on this topic.