Gluster users - Jun 2015 - Please advise for our file server cluster

Hi,

We are a small business and now we are planning to build a new file 
server system. I did some research and I decide to use GlusterFS as the 
cluster system to build a 2-node system. Our goals are trying to 
minimize the downtime and to avoid single point of failure. Meanwhile, I 
need keep an eye on the budget.

In our office we have 20+ computers running Ubuntu. Few(6) machines use 
Windows 8. We use a SAMBA server to take care file sharing.

I did some research and here are some main components I selected for the 
system:
M/B: Asus P9D-E/4L (It has 6 SATA ports so I can use softRAID5 for data 
storage. 4 NIC ports so I can do link aggregation)
CPU: XEON E3-1220v3 3.1GHz (is this over kill? the MB also support i3 
though.)
Memory: 4x8GB ECC DDR3
SSD: 120 GB for OS
Hard Drive: 4 (or 5) 3TB 7200RPM drive to form soft RAID5
10GBe card: Intel X540-T1

About the hardware I am not confident. One thing is the 10GBe card. Is 
it sufficient? I chose this because it's less expensive. But I don't 
want it drag the system down once I build them. Also, if I only need 2 
nodes, can I just use CAT6 cable to link them together? or I have to use 
a 10GBe switch?

Could someone give me some advice?

Thanks.

Gao




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On 15-06-05 04:30 PM, Gao wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are a small business and now we are planning to build a new file 
> server system. I did some research and I decide to use GlusterFS as 
> the cluster system to build a 2-node system. Our goals are trying to 
> minimize the downtime and to avoid single point of failure. Meanwhile, 
> I need keep an eye on the budget.
>
> In our office we have 20+ computers running Ubuntu. Few(6) machines 
> use Windows 8. We use a SAMBA server to take care file sharing.
>
> I did some research and here are some main components I selected for 
> the system:
> M/B: Asus P9D-E/4L (It has 6 SATA ports so I can use softRAID5 for 
> data storage. 4 NIC ports so I can do link aggregation)
> CPU: XEON E3-1220v3 3.1GHz (is this over kill? the MB also support i3 
> though.)
> Memory: 4x8GB ECC DDR3
> SSD: 120 GB for OS
> Hard Drive: 4 (or 5) 3TB 7200RPM drive to form soft RAID5
> 10GBe card: Intel X540-T1
>
> About the hardware I am not confident. One thing is the 10GBe card. Is 
> it sufficient? I chose this because it's less expensive. But I
don't
> want it drag the system down once I build them. Also, if I only need 2 
> nodes, can I just use CAT6 cable to link them together? or I have to 
> use a 10GBe switch?
>
> Could someone give me some advice?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Gao
>
>
>
>
Any help? Please.

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