Why I Love Rockstor on our Storinators

As a NAS operating system, FreeNAS has been out there for a decade. Working on the beautiful marriage of FreeBSD and ZFS, it's been tried and tested by many users within the storage community, to great success. But if you're one of those people who is more into Linux and Btrfs, you may be yearning for an alternative.

Over the past few months here in the 45 Drives lab, we have been putting an exciting new NAS OS through its paces on our Storinators. After working through a few kinks, such as how to set up redundant boot drives, we are ready to introduce Rockstor as one of our recommended solutions to create a solid NAS appliance when installed on a Storinator (alongside the traditional OS option, FreeNAS). I am writing this post to talk about why I like Rockstor, its Linux+Btrfs roots, and to share a bit of the story of how we got here.

Welcome, Rockstor.

Some of you may already be familiar with, or at least have heard of, Rockstor, a Linux + Btrfs-powered NAS OS. I, and the rest of the 45 Drives team, first heard of Rockstor when founder and lead engineer Suman Chakravartula contacted us back in November 2014 as a prospective hardware partner. We were pretty excited with the idea of helping a new NAS appliance gets its footing – it’s just another example of how the storage community really is a collaborative environment, and one that we’re proud to be a part of.

How to Saturate a 20Gbit Network Using Real Data Files Over a Samba Share

My last post, How to Achieve 20 Gb & 30 Gb Bandwidth through Network Bonding, was our most popular blog entry yet. There was a LOT of discussion and comments about the results of my testing, as well as network bonding in general (including here) – which was awesome to see. It's great when people care about what you write!

One prevalent comment was that our first experiments in network bonding didn’t go far enough, that we didn’t move real files to and from large RAIDs across the network.

And so, here is my follow-up post. In this set of experiments, I will attempt to saturate a 20Gbit network with two different bonding modes using real data files across the network using a samba share on a Storinator storage pod. The goal is to show that any user, from small video producers to a large enterprise corporation, can achieve incredibly fast and reliable throughput from their storage server using 10GbE and bonding.

How to Achieve 20Gb and 30Gb Bandwidth through Network Bonding

We’re adding another new voice to the blog – Rob MacQueen is an engineer in our R&D department. In his first blog post, he shares his experiments with setting up network bonding in order to achieve 30Gb bandwidth. Welcome Rob!

The cost of 10GbE networking has dropped dramatically in the last two years. Plus, getting 10GbE to work has simplified as hardware and drivers have matured. This is to the point that anyone who has set up a 1GbE network can set up a 10GbE network. 

And if you are used to 1GbE, you'll love the extra bandwidth in 10GbE. I figure it's sort of like buying one of those new Mustangs ... with the 5.0 liter engine, not that I own one :).

But, if you're like me, faster is never fast enough. The good news for us speed junkies is that it is easy to get lots more from your new 10GbE network. All you have to do is install more than one port, and bind them together.

I've been doing this at 45 Drives in order to test our Storinator storage pods (since they can easily read and write at beyond 2 gigabytes per second, thus easily saturating a single or even double 10GbE connections). My post today will share my work in network bonding, and I'll show how I create 20GbE and 30GbE connections.

Rockstor on 45 Drives, A.K.A. The Rockinator

Introducing a new voice to the 45 Drives blog, Darrell Cormier. Darrell is part of our R&D team!

At 45 Drives, we're continuously striving to improve the quality of our systems. Our goal is to provide industrial-strength storage solutions to our customers that are exceptionally affordable. As a part of that, we're always looking to innovate our Storinator storage pods to perform even better than before.

As part of this process, we began to explore a new open source NAS operating system called Rockstor. This Network Attached Storage system strives to simplify network storage as much as possible without compromising features or performance.

Rockstor's Storinator Q30, all ready for testing!

Rockstor was created and developed by Suman Chakravartula, who we began working with late last year. Since then, both the Rockstor team and 45 Drives have been hard at work to bring the technological advantages of our partnership to our customers and users.

Soon, this dream will be a reality - we're almost ready for Rockstor to be available on all of our 45 Drives storage pods, including our new Storinator NAS Appliances.

Suman recently wrote a blog post about his experience setting up Rockstor on a Storinator Q30. Have a read and let us know what you think!

Blog Post: Rockstor on 45 Drives, A.K.A. The Rockinator

Stay tuned for details on Rockstor as an option on Storinators.

Power Draw of Enterprise-Class Hard Drives Versus Consumer-Class Drives

In previous posts, I showed measurements of the power draw of Consumer (C-class) HDDs, in both standard and staggered start-up. In this post, I'm showing the same power draw tests, but this time with Enterprise (E-class) HDDs!

Consumer vs. Enterprise

First of all, before we get into the fun stuff on power draw, let’s clear up some of the mystery of enterprise drives. You may be wondering, “I’ve heard E-drives might not be all that better, aren't E-class drives just the same old drive with a higher price tag and longer warranty?" 

These suspicions and rumours have been stoked by certain sources (Backblaze or Google) who have been saying C-class drives are just as good.

Well, we believe that is misleading, and what Backblaze and Google say is true, but their assertions are very specific to their own highly specialized applications.  

The two classes of drives are meant for different applications, and because of that, each are specifically designed and manufactured to address the certain design criteria required.

Why We Decided to Offer Enterprise-Class Drives to Our Customers

You've seen him in our 45 Drives videos, now Product Manager Stephen MacNeil lends his voice to the 45 Drives blog to discuss our latest news - we're now offering enterprise-class hard drives to our customers!

As the product manager, I've been a part of 45 Drives from the beginning. As a key part of the visionary team, I've seen us begin by innovating a new storage pod with the help of Backblaze to becoming the storage pod of choice for tech experts wanting to stray from the status quo. 

And now, having expanded our product line to three new Storinators earlier this year, 45 Drives is now known for offering fully customizable, bulletproof, ultra high-performance data servers that exceed customers expectations - both large and small.

A new WD enterprise-class hard drive, fresh out of the box in our R&D lab.

45 Drives was built on the idea that we listen to our customers and adapt to their needs and applications. My combined backgrounds in engineering and sales means I'm driven to come up with the best solutions I can for my customers. Even better, I'm in the enviable position of having a voice that's heard by our research and innovation team, so when my customers talk to me about their needs and concerns, I listen.

Staggered Spinup and Its Effect on Power Draw

In Part 1 of the series, I discussed the Power Draw of a Storinator on Startup and other conditions. Results showed that our Storinator’s Power Supply Unit (PSU) is well suited for the task at hand – starting and maintaining 45 HDDs and the other components.

However, not all drives are created equal. Some pull more current than others during start up and while the previous measurements showed the drives used are well below the maximum limit of the PSU, other drives may not fare as well.

If you have power-hungry drives, or are worried about a large start-up draw, don't worry – we have you covered! Our Storinators are able to reduce the initial current draw by staggering the spinup of the drives, with the trade-off of a slower boot time.  

What is Staggered Spinup (SSU)?

When you turn your Storinator on, power flows to all the components instantaneously. This includes the motherboard, hard drives, fans and more – essentially everything that is attached to the PSU. Most of the components have a fairly constant power draw upon start-up, however, this is not the case for hard drives. 

Due to the nature of how they work, the start-up power they demand to spin up the platters inside can be quite large compared to their normal operating power. This was shown in my previous blog post, start-up current draws peak around 3x steady state for the 12V and 2x steady state of the 5V.