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I inherited responsibility for the back-end of a growing distance education program. They have a Proliant DL160 Gen8 web server which serves video from a ReadyNAS Pro 6. We currently share the ReadyNAS with another department and are planning on giving it to them and switching to hosting the videos on our own machine.

My current question is whether I should throw more drives in RAID in the web server, get a separate server for storage or a true NAS. We serve about 100GB/video per hour but need to allow for 3-5x that amount as the program is rapidly growing. Network traffic peaks as high as 200MB/s.

At the moment, we really only need to store 2-3TB of video per semester after which it can be moved to archive. I'm trying to find the optimal combination of price, speed and reliability. Thanks in advance for any suggestions, I want to make sure I set this up right the first time and heavily document everything for my eventual successor.

Phteven
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  • Thanks, that actually helps a lot! Apologies for duplicating efforts, it sounds like I'll have to test some hardware setups and benchmark them. – Phteven Apr 29 '14 at 15:24

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One Proposal would be a two-stage solution:

The 2-3TB you need at the moment could be direct attached storage either in the same box or attached via fibre, eSata, etc. maybe SSDs depending on your budget. This could give you very good read performance - keep an eye towards a raid/filesystem combo that handles large files well and is optimized for fast reads. See this answer:

https://superuser.com/questions/437481/what-is-the-fastest-raid-in-practise

I personally like the XFS file system - there are others

Then for your archives you could go NAS, which is slower but at this point you don't care you just need a repository.

Community
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John Kloian
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