Storage..

A Solaris NFS/ZFS Appliance


Storage at home is always a problem. I mean, you’ll never know if that nut, bolt and whatchamacallit will come in handy one day.... The same goes for the digital age, that file, that picture... you may just need it one day, or perhaps you’d just like a place to back things up to..

I kept buying single ‘portable’ hard drives as i overflowed my various configurations.. (i have 5 Macs, and an iWill zmaxdp) It was time to have a more viable solution.. So I set out to build something that would hold about 8 disks, have an decent ethernet connection, something that could be headless..

After various configurations of motherboards and cases, Jeff Smith hit me with the clue bat, “hey, just use an Ultra 40!”. So here is the recipe:-

I Ordered an Ultra 40 with the additional hard-drive backplane kit (X4213A), the other CPU (X4191A-Z), and an extra 2 Gig of memory (X5287A-Z). Now, where will I find the all important SPUD, nope it’s not a potato, it’s the bracket that will allow a disk to be mounted in the Ultra 40 disk bays. It seems that part number 540-3024 works ! and you can find them here. How about some disks ? We like seagate, and so sprinkle some of these. Now, I said headless, well we need one of these. Next all you gotta do is assemble, configure ZFS/NFS and start using it..

Technorati Tags: nfs, nfsv4, OpenSolaris, ZFS, Solaris