A New Year a New Project
This year has started with a flurry both at work and at home however I have started a New Year project. After receiving my latest energy bills prior to Christmas I have had to rethink how we provide data to the home. The home network is currently built around a X4100 server providing Data and Virtual Machine Services to either Thin Clients or Appliances such as the AppleTV. Along with the client devices there are a number of External drives providing multiple backup points some of which are then provide off site data services to my parents using Jonathan Schwartz favourite method of moving data when your network pipe is small; picking up the drive and carrying it off site.
Having spent a lot of beer time discussing the unified storage platform at CEC 08 and arguing that a home version is required to help solve the data influx caused by HD Video, Digital Music and RAW picture files. I decided to adopt the Open Storage way of thinking and build my own based on the following requirements:
- Low power consumption
- As quiet as possible
- Data integrity checking
- Approx 3TB or usable Storage
- Data is kept separate from the OS
- Ability to integrate into the network so my wife can find the data
- Aesthetically pleasing in my office
Having completed some research I decided on the Bill of Materials as follows:
- Chenrbo ES34069
- Intel D945GCLF2
- 2GB Low Profile DIMM
- Reclaimed Low Profile DVD Drive from an old Laptop
- Dual Compact Flash to IDE Adapter
- Low profile SATA Controller (Propabl SIL3114 or 3152)
- 2 x SanDisk Extreme II 4GB compact flash card
- 4 x 1TB disks (Ideally Western Digital Caviar Green RAID Drives)
- OpenSolaris USB Disk for install
As the hardware arrives and I start the build I will continue to blog my findings, in the mean time I will build a Virtual Box Open Solaris build to simulate the above so I can start to finess my OS configuration and start to resolve issues such as multicast DNS to work with Apple Bonjore, ZFS configuration, CIFS, iSCSI including to find a iSCSI initiator for OS-X to enable central Time Machine backup.
