I finished putting together a fileserver today to replace HiveStor that died. This time around, all discs are arranged in fault tolerant arrangements.
I have deemed it “FaStor” or “FastOr” or just “Fastor” … Horrible, I know…
Right now I have a “minimal” configuration up and running. It is providing CIFS in the “Hive13” workgroup. The “NetShare” CIFS export is available to all machines / all users with no security. It lives on the main array. I am mapping it as the “N:” drive on the Windows PCs in the space. The same filespace is exported via NFS as /mnt/primary-z3/Shared I’ll work on making sure it’s available to the linux machines in the space.
It’s running FreeNAS 8.3.0p1, a fileserver appliance built on FreeBSD. ( www.freenas.org ) I did not run the beta version with volume encryption, but if people think this is necessary then I can upgrade it. Now would be the time to do this because I will have to wipe volumes in order to enable encryption.
Hardware Specs for those who care:
Dell PowerEdge 2850, Dual 64bit Xeon 3.0Ghz, 8 Gb RAM, onboard LSI SCSI controller, extra PCI-X LSI SCSI adapter for disc shelf, extra PCI-X dual GigE adapter for a total of 4 GigE ports, 6x hotswap U320 SCSI bays, 2x redundant power supplies
Adaptec Evo disc shelf, 12x hotswap U320 SCSI bays, 2x redundant power supplies.
-OS is installed on a 4gig USB stick plugged in the rear of the machine, boots off USB.
-Array 1 = 11x U320 146Gb 10K SCSI arranged as a ZFS RAIDZ3 volume, approximately 1TB formatted capacity. Three of the eleven drives can fail without data loss. Realtime lzjb (like zip/gzip) compression enabled
-Array 2 = 6x U320 73Gb 10K SCSI arranged as a ZFS RAID10 volume, approximately 200Gb formatted capacity. Three of the six drives can fail without data loss.
The server also kicks out the entire second array as iSCSI. I’m going to do a crossover cable link to the VMWare server, which will probably be the main consumer of this in order to keep this traffic off the switch backbone.
I’m planning on turning on ZFS caching since there is plenty of RAM, possibly firing up active directory, possibly more. Wanted to get something up and running quickly so this initial config is pretty bare.
It is really fast. Like saturate gigabit ethernet fast. Good thing there are 4 GigE ports on the server. 
-Dave B.