“Configure a 22 TB Storage Server for Backup in very Low cost, around US$2000 Budget”

                Recently a month ago, one of my friend asked me to provide a storage server of around 22 Terra Byte in a budget of US$2000. At the first place, I was astonished to provide him such a huge capacity storage Server within this much low budget. Although, I asked him to wait for some days, so that I can do some market survey and create some good and efficient solution.

Anyways, after glancing over many blogs on the web, I could not find some satisfactory solution for it. Well, I went to some local markets and started to search for some feasible solution, but could not find some storage/server which supports this much high capacity within our budget. Meanwhile, I continued to search for some good solution.

At last, after some days of research, I created the solution, which I formatted with around the capacity of 22TB (21.6 TB usable)….

Let me show you the details, so that the other people with the similar requirements may be able to arrange it easily.

At the first stage I found some used Server machine which supports Eight Hot Swappable front panel LFF (Large Form Factor, 3.5” Disk drives), the reason why I have chosen 3.5” Disk drives instead of 2.5” SFF drives is that the former is available in large capacities these days and the availability is easy in the market.

e.g., I purchased Dell R510 which is a 2U Rack Mountable Server (Purchased for around US$650). Here are its main specs:

1. Quad Core Intel Xeon Processor E56xx Series
2. 16GB DDR3 RAM
3. Dual Power Supply for Power redundancy

SERVER FRONT:

SERVER BACK:

BUT, the major problem is that mostly old servers do not support the Single Disk Size larger than 2TB, which is a main barrier in attaining high capacity within a single server. For the instance, if we say that if we install Eight disks of 2TB (1.8TB usable), then the total usable capacity (after RAID5 and one disk for Hot spare) should be around:

Total number of Disks: 8 – 2 (1 Disk capacity for RAID5 Parity and 1 Hot Spare) = 6 Disks usable capacity

Now that,

               1.8 (usable capacity of each disk) x 6 = 10.8 TB Usable capacity

So it is the main Barrier to attain such a high capacity within a single server. Therefore, I had to cross this Barrier so that I can attain the maximum capacity as per our requirement…

For this purpose, I researched on different RAID controllers, which supports high capacity disk drives which cross the barrier of 2TB limit.

At last I found one, which was available in the local Market. It was Dell PERC H700 Controller with battery backup (Purchased for around US$50) and installed in the Server.

This RAID controller is very a good and efficient one and it easily supports Disks larger than 2 TB Capacity.

Now at this stage, my Server was ready for the Disks to be installed.

Lastly, I purchased the maximum capacity SATA Disks which were easily available in the Market and which can work in the Server.

So, after some research, I purchased the 4TB SATA Disks (Qty. 8) (Purchased each Disk for around US$170). You can purchase disks from any manufacturer, but my good experience was with the Western Digital disks.

 So, now here are the capacity formulation, which I used for this configuration:

8 Disks – 2 Disks (1 Disk capacity for RAID5 Parity and 1 Disk for Hot Spare) == Total 6 Disks Available capacity, So,

4TB x 6 Disks = 24TB RAW Capacity

After formatting total Usable capacity is around 21.6 TB

TOTAL COST ANALYSIS:

1. Server with RAID Controller = ~US$700
2. 4TB WD SATA-III Disks x 8 = ~US$1360

    Grand TOTAL: ~US$2060

 CONCLUSION:

So, in the nutshell, I managed to arrange the Server within the Budget! Which is working perfectly fine…

This Server can be utilized with many different configurations, I installed VMware ESXi 6x on it and created a VM and allocated Disk space to it and using according to the requirement. But remember, it is not recommended for live transactions or intensive load on it, because the Disks we used are not designed for this purpose. It is well enough for FTP backup or VM backup dumps over the night on it, etc, etc.

Your positive feedback is warmly welcome and correct me if I am wrong in this regard. Thanks for your time to read it.