Server 2012 R2 Fileserver with Auto-Tiering

[CougTek]

I need to build a new fileserver for one of the company I work for. We use a Synology NAS for the archives, but it isn't fast enough for the live data. I need auto-tiering and LDAP authentification. I plan to use a standard server with Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Edition. I might also use it as a domain controller, but that's still not decided.

I've setup several Server 2012 R2 as file servers, but none of them needed auto-tiering since they all had a single kind of storage (mainly 10K SFF drives). I want to put two 800GB SSD (Samsung 845DC Pro) into the file server and use a RAID 10 of Seagate's newly available 1.8TB 10K SFF SAS 12G drives for the slower storage pool. I've found an interesting article on how to do that, but I still have a few questions :

• Does Server 2012 R2 needs a lot of RAM to provide good file server performances? For instance, NexentaStor recommends 48GB of RAM and OpenFiller needs even more.
• Is it preferable to leaves the drives independantly configured or can I configure hardware RAID volumes and then present those volumes as Server 2012 storage pools?
• Excluding the possibility of using the server as a combined DC and file server, could I get better performances/reliability by using another OS for the file server? I do need LDAP and auto-tiering.

One of the two company's managers told me he wants something as fast as the access we currently have from the main site. The main site's file server is located on a 3PAR 7200 with 40x 300GB 15K SFF drives. It sustains 8000 iops (mesured). That thing cost the price of a luxury car even Ddrueding would enjoy to ride. However, I doubt I have much more than 10K$ to spend on the new file server, maybe 12K$, but I still need to match the 3PAR's performance. I won't be able with 10K mecanical drives, even improved newer models, hence the need to use SSDs and auto-tiering.

 

[ddrueding]

The higher-end Synology boxes support SSDs for caching, you don't think that will be enough? 2*800 + 4*1800 = 8.8TB. You might be able to go with fewer features but a solid block of SSDs (not the DC Pro, but many others could be had for <$10k).

 

[Mercutio]

Storage Pools are a not-quite-ready-for-big-time option where there's definitely a certain amount of "Well, that's how it's SUPPOSED to work" in Microsoft's documentation vs. an endless stream of "This isn't working" edge cases from people trying to use them.

For example, I have a marked-as-retired yet unremovable volume in one of my pools at home right now that causes the whole pool to appear to be unreliable in Server Manager. The drive died seven months ago and was automatically replaced by a hot spare
but apparently short of completely deleting the array, no amount of powershell magic can completely kill it even though it no longer has an associated GID or FriendlyName. Windows just thinks there should still be a drive there because reasons.

If you have access to real RAID controllers, you may be better off using the tools they give you for administration. Yes, you can add a hardware RAID volume to a Storage Pool, but if you're depending on everything working perfectly all the time, it's probably better to just as well to manage everything from hardware since the alternative in my case was to build monitoring scripts out of spit and powershell and hope I didn't forget anything. On the other hand, if you're dealing with Storage Pools at all, you're going to be doing almost all your work from a powershell prompt anyway, so you might as well run everything through it for consistency's sake.

Does Windows Server need lots of RAM to be a file server? Probably not unless you're using deduplication. 8GB seems to be plenty, at least for loads up up to 75 - 100 typical office-type users, which really is about as large as my experience can speak to.

For servicing Windows clients specifically and after trying a number of alternatives, I wasn't able to find anything faster using the hardware that I have. We should perhaps not be surprised that Windows is very good for serving files to Windows. I tried a number of NAS-type *Nix distributions before settling back on Windows. I'm not fully certain I can speak to the level of general reliability; I haven't dealt with any failure so catastrophic to make me think that Windows specifically is unreliable for your purpose.

 

[CougTek]

The higher-end Synology boxes support SSDs for caching, you don't think that will be enough? 2*800 + 4*1800 = 8.8TB. You might be able to go with fewer features but a solid block of SSDs (not the DC Pro, but many others could be had for <$10k).

The higher-end Synology only accept LFF SATA drives and they cost close to 6000$ CDN. I've also looked at QNAP's offerings, but the models with SFF SAS drives cost around 10000$. Both the Synology and QNAP's high-end models use a Xeon E3 for the processing, therefore they are limited to 32GB of RAM. Sure, the software is nice, but they are quite expensive for the hardware they have.

For less than 6000$ CDN, I can have a two-node Supermicro 2028TP-DC0R, with one of the nodes populated with a Xeon E5-2650 v3 and 64GB of 2133MHz DDR4 RAM. It has a SAS 12G RAID controller (LSI3008 ) and 12 SFF drives per node (4 SATA 6G and 8 SAS 12G). I just have to add a dual-port SFP+ 10G controller (still below 6000$ CDN overall). Since it's a SuperMicro server, I don't have to pay for the KVM-over-IP, like with HP, Lenovo and others. Only things missings are the drives and the OS. Pretty much the same price as a much lower-end Synology RS3614xs+ and much cheaper than a QNAP SS-EC1279U-SAS-RP.

I can also add a CPU/RAM/SFP+ NIC on the second node to get redundancy and mirror the data between both nodes in case of a failure.

So far, that's the plan.

 

[CougTek]

Does Windows Server need lots of RAM to be a file server? Probably not unless you're using deduplication. 8GB seems to be plenty, at least for loads up up to 75 - 100 typical office-type users, which really is about as large as my experience can speak to.

I plan on using deduplication. Also, that file server will be for an office of 30 to 50 employees, but many of them are not your typical MS Office user type. Half of them will probably try to store and run one or more VM over the network. There's also a lot of .iso transfers.