Our storage server prototype build is now complete and we have moved on to configuration, tuning and testing. After some delays in sourcing components the build is now complete and everything appears to be working. The server will run BSD with ZFS. The chassis holds 24 3.5″ HDDs in hot-swap bays. These are connected to an Adaptec raid controller via a 4U SAS II expander back-plane. The RAID configuration consists of 4 RAID6 volumes over which a set of ZFS filesystems will be striped. This will give us a raw storage capacity of 16TB. A SSD is used for ZFS optimisation.

Our tuning techniques and performance results will appear here soon. If everything goes to plan we will be using 4 servers configured in this way to host user home directories and research data for the School.