Several months ago, I embarked on a quest to Unplug from the cloud. I currently have a FreeNAS server that hosts almost all of my data and runs several other services. The hardware on it is absolute overkill for the workload, but I'm steadily growing into it.
I'm considering building a second box for the sole purpose of being an offsite FreeNAS server to collocate my data. Right now, I do local replication to a second pool and store the drives.
Does anyone have hardware suggestions appropriate for the task or experience with this? Seeing as it will just sit somewhere as a 3rd redundancy, I'd prefer not to overspec it.
If you prefer taking chances on inexpensive hardware, you could go as low as an AMD E-350 board. Replication doesn't require much horsepower, neither does ssh (well, it will while your NAS boxen are on the same LAN, use Encryption Cipher: Fast at this point), neither does compression. If you're trying to dedup, you'll be sad, but you'd be sad on a goddamned Xeon as well, so probably just best to not dedup. However, do not skimp on the NIC. Realteks blow chunks. Spend the $30 and get yourself a nice Intel NIC. For memory, people say ECC is not required, and maybe it's not. But I'd still recommend at least 8GB of memory, ECC or not.
Other recommendations: - Dedicated user for replication, this means not root, and not the user you normally use to manage your boxen - Disallow root login with password - ssh to the replication target should be done via a random high port number - Make the home directories for root and your other users a dataset on your primary pool, rather than on the installation media (which presumably will be the typical sacrificial USB thumb drive) - If you've got a lot of data, make sure to seed the replication, either by replicating while on the same network as your primary NAS box, or by replicating to and from an external drive
It's definitely doable. Are you open to used and consumer grade equipment? Any dual-core CPU should be good. I figure you could probably get a pretty decent deal on a dual core celeron with ECC support. Something like the g3920. and for the motherboard, consider the Intel DBS1200SPL.
Obviously, there's a bit of room to play. If you want more CPU power for other stuff later, consider the E3 1240 v5 which will fit with the motherboard I linked above.
ZFS replication in freenas is definitely a solid system.
Thanks for the hardware recommendation. Price isn't a concern in the sense of having a max budget, but I think sticking a xeon in it to just receive replications is overkill. The G3920 and DBS1200SPL you suggested looks appropriate for the task.
This box will literally just collect backups and dust . Which is why I'm looking to go with minimal hardware that is appropriate for the task. Building boxes is a tad out of my wheelhouse as a software guy.
I hear you. There may be others who are better suited for this task than I.
This build I recommended supports ECC ram, so get it if you can.
I'm not sure what your hard drive requirements are, but that board has support for 8 sata devices, so you should be good in that regards. I'm not sure if you're going to need a rackmount case or not, but supermicro makes some nice cases.