These Servers are TOO EXPENSIVE - Hybrid Storage Explored #Helpful Post

so I've got a problem when it comes to

building a storage server there are two

main options for your drives you can

either go with SSDs which are compact

and have amazing performance or you can

go with traditional mechanical storage

which has the benefit of lower prices

and outstanding capacity with the

drawback of being an order of magnitude

or more slower especially in highly

random workloads like if they were

loaded up with a bunch of virtual

machines or in our case if they're

pulling network storage duty for a whole

bunch of heavy users who are all trying

to edit 8k videos at the same time if

only there were some way to merge the

benefits of both with the drawbacks of

neither well there is it's called the

Appel fusion drive and this episode is

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linus at the link below

the concept of tiered storage is nothing

new it's been commonplace in the data

center for many years and has even made

its way down to the consumer level in

the form of Intel's Rapid Storage

Technology or rst which uses a small

fast SSD to accelerate a larger slower

mechanical drive and more recently

Intel's octane memory technology which

does pretty much the exact same thing

but with even faster octane rather than

NAND SSDs the problem that I'm running

into here is that most of the tearing

solutions out there have one of two

problems they are either inordinately

complicated to set up requiring

extensive knowledge of not just Linux

but even broader storage architecture or

they are expensive because you are

paying the folks who have the

aforementioned knowledge to create a

turnkey solution for you there are some

exceptions to this however and I would

like to explore a couple of them so the

popular freebsd based FreeNAS software

for my existence uses your systems RAM

and its SSDs to cache frequently used

data that's stored on your mechanical

hard drives but the issue is that ZFS

this particular implementation is geared

more towards accelerating performance of

large databases and doesn't look like

it's gonna be great for our workload

because the file sizes that we want

cached that we're storing on our hard

drives are so large like these are 8k

red video files and there are practical

limits to how much level to Ark that

would be the SSD tier I mean there's

also practical limits to how much RAM

you can put in a given system so then

the one we're gonna try today is the

built-in tearing mode for storage spaces

in Windows Server and what better way to

test this out then to set up a tiered

storage space on the network so I'm

going to use this test server right here

and then have our team of editors just

switch over to it and see what happens

and it's at this point then that we

wondered whether or not obtained would

make a difference for some of the heavy

tasks that we deal with around the

office no no it does not now our regular

editing server uses 31 1.2 terabyte nvme

drives and it was really expensive for

us to build and they've been complaining

that there's not enough space on it

because we've only got about 24

terabytes of usable space after all the

lost space to redundancy on it and they

were like oh well you could just upgrade

it I went yeah ok technically I do have

another 17 bays that I could fill up but

that's gonna cost me like 7 grand 8

grand

even if I buy used drives on eBay so I

was looking for another way so our test

server here the config is pretty

straightforward I've got 4 10 terabyte

drives then because I want to speak

exactly how much cash you need this is

what really got me thinking about it

Intel uses just 32 gigs of cache for

large multi terabyte hard drives and

we've seen real world huge increases in

performance so I went okay let's try

this so I took two of their 900 series

op team PCI Express drives and then I've

got a total of 40 terabytes of

mechanical storage and I want to see if

for a fraction of the price we can get

good enough performance that the editors

aren't going to run into a bottleneck so

you can see I've got my four mechanical

drives I've got my two SSDs allocation

is all gonna be automatic so I go ahead

and I try to create a pool okay I've

created a pool now I try to create a

virtual disk create storage tiers on

this virtual disk it should

automatically detect which ones are your

fast drives and which ones are your

capacity drives so we're gonna use

mirroring because that way we're

protected from a drive failure

going to use fixed provisioning and now

we get to specify the size of our faster

and our standard tier we're gonna go

ahead and select the maximum sizes

failed to create virtual disks not

supported so the issue is that the GUI

version of storage spaces doesn't have

some very important options like

selecting how many columns you want so

when you only have two drives and the

default is three columns it spits out

this stupid error how did nobody at

Microsoft notice this for years anyway

doesn't matter I called in a life line

LED eater over on the forum is a guru

when it comes to this stuff so I'm just

gonna pull up his DM over there and

follow his instructions to hopefully do

this in PowerShell so this will be fun

you guys are gonna be learning right

along with me I haven't done this before

the video so I can still use the GUI to

create my storage pool apparently go

ahead and do that then I need to fire up

PowerShell and change the default number

of columns okay well I don't know what I

just did but I'm going to change it to

mirror number of columns default one I

think I think we did that let's find him

so I think the command I just entered

changed the mirror layout default to one

column it did not

okay so I'm using PowerShell ISE now and

this seems to be working better mirror

number of columns to fall one come on so

much right now

I just want to change a stupid English

setting definitely called mirror

it's definitely called storage pool one

ok create these commands using their own

thing we'll figure this out at some

point the good news is there's a back-up

plan swear I had this working at one

point

all right here we go

so right now we've only got a 10 gig

link I can put a faster card in here if

it ends up being a networking bottleneck

but for now what we need to do is grab a

bunch of just like video projects that

are actually current and copy them to

our tiered storage drive here the idea

is that I want to bring over more than

would comfortably fit in the cache and

then I want the editors during our test

to open up first a whole set of

completely different projects from each

other then close those open up a new set

go back open the other ones and evaluate

the performance for themselves so we're

back and we settled into a steady

transfer speed of anywhere from 200 to

300 plus megabytes a second and all of

our projects are over on here so I guess

all that's left for me to do then is go

interrupt the editing team so I just

need to know if you guys all hit this

and try to edit 8k footage at the same

time will you notice slowdowns because I

know some people are sensitive to

slowdowns so here's the idea this is the

network share so everyone kind of pick a

project and open it and start doing

video editor things whatever those are

work the way you would normally work

because full is going to be affected by

like your system as well so the idea is

that once it arrives it gets cached in

the fast tier so I just wanted to get a

feel for what this is like ed are you

opening project Oh coding but you're

encoding it Oh exporting probably isn't

a very stressful test ok what are you

doing Taryn

can you try doing some more editorials

like pretend to edit this moving stuff

around I keep pretending pretend to do

your job yes can you go back and play

that sequence again and see if it's any

better how fast would you expect it to

be like it's just normal or okay just

hold on a second I haven't I haven't

given up on saving money yet so the

thing I want to find out now

is if you guys keep doing stuff will it

get any better so I'm starting to come

around to the realization that maybe

tiered storage solutions aren't

grab-and-go

because in every environment you'd want

your tears to behave in a completely

different manner like if there was some

programmability in storage spaces where

I could say okay take all the newest

files that come in and assume they are

important until such time as they do not

get accessed for a very long period or

until such time as something new comes

in and bumps it out then it would be

less likely for those guys to open up a

project and have it chug until storage

spaces goes oh this is important and can

promote it from the slow mechanical tear

so it's possible that if I had a much

much larger fast nvme tear we wouldn't

run into this issue because this is

really a very heavy load for for hard

drives and two SSDs but the problem is

that that would require me to basically

build that entire server without even

knowing that it would work so you are

dropping I'm dropping neighbors in my

friends can you rate your editing

experience out of ten for me here

seven out of ten sorry you're you're

saying this is better than one all right

everyone just go back to wanna con map

the drive throw it all in the garbage

so that's pretty much it I am coming to

the the the acceptance stage in the in

the stages of grief here where I'm

realizing that if we want more capacity

of our high performance network storage

I'm just gonna have to pull out the

wallet and make it happen

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