New server

posted on 09:47 AM on Saturday 11 May 2013

After more than 5 years, I am retiring the server and putting in a new one. The new one is based on the ITX form factor so it is much smaller and cooler. Specifications as follows:

• Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX Case (Black)

• Asus P8H77-I Intel Skt1155 Mini-ITX mainboard

• 2 x Kingston 8GB 1600 DDR3 Value Rams

• Seasonic G-450 450W Modular 80+ Gold

• Intel i3-3220

• 6 x Western Digital 3TB Green

• Sonnet Tempo SATA E2P

Installation of Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS is uneventful and it is quite speedy. ZFS on linux is now a robust solution and boy is it a nice filesystem. Getting a raidz1 ZFS filesystem on the 6 3TB was a breeze and performance was good. Bonnie++ showed ~250 MB/s for reads and ~220 MB/s for writes which is more than good enough for me since my networking is limited to 1Gbps. To the main machine, a 4bay and a 8way Hotway enclosures were connected via eSATA. 6 x 1TB and 6 x 2TB drives were installed in them. Performance on the external enclosures were limited to about 100 MB/s due to the nature of the addon card (1x PCIe).

An 8 hour mprime went well and a copy of the previous data to the new drives was also alright so the system appears to be stable. The entire move took almost a week with testing and migration of the data taking up most of the time.

The old server to be retired is shown below. It will be missed.

The new server is shown below:

computer