Burn, baby...diskless inferno...

[5chn3ll]

Cloning SSDs for Dell blades. My low-tech setup:

[32wildbilly]

Cloning SSDs for Dell blades. My low-tech setup:

20200624_164613.jpg

Plain Anglish please!

[5chn3ll]

We run a bunch of high-density servers (12 blade computers in each enclosure) to host one of our products. Instead of installing and configuring the operating system and all of the server configuration a couple dozen times, I build a master image for one computer and clone the drive onto blank drives so we wind up a bunch of identically-configured machines.

There are software tools to do this, but I really like hardware cloning. I have another unit at the office that will clone three new drives simultaneously, but I only need to bust out 5 today, and it only takes about 10 minutes for each clone...

[32wildbilly]

We run a bunch of high-density servers (12 blade computers in each enclosure) to host one of our products. Instead of installing and configuring the operating system and all of the server configuration a couple dozen times, I build a master image for one computer and clone the drive onto blank drives so we wind up a bunch of identically-configured machines.

There are software tools to do this, but I really like hardware cloning. I have another unit at the office that will clone three new drives simultaneously, but I only need to bust out 5 today, and it only takes about 10 minutes for each clone...

Yep! Clear as mud...and you are still this guy.

9DD52FC1-2052-42D4-9503-B334749AE559_4_5005_c.jpeg (72.68 KiB) Viewed 1877 times

[Dr_Strangelove]

I feel like each one of these pictures is a puzzle. Tell us about Thermodynamics! (Actually, looks like you haven't cracked it yet...)

How often do you have to replace these Samsung drives on a Dell Blade? I have my editors & animators working together off of Qnap 8-bay diskless NAS servers. I'd say we replace a disk or two every year or two. Though, those drives see some serious writing, re-writing, and re-re writing at least 40-50 hours a week. Our "Art Server" is an array of 3x Promise Pegasus 8-bay servers (we do lotsa art ) and those drives seem to fail more often than on the Qnaps, even though the Qnaps are tuned for speed.

[32wildbilly]

I feel like each one of these pictures is a puzzle. Tell us about Thermodynamics! (Actually, looks like you haven't cracked it yet...)

How often do you have to replace these Samsung drives on a Dell Blade? I have my editors & animators working together off of Qnap 8-bay diskless NAS servers. I'd say we replace a disk or two every year or two. Though, those drives see some serious writing, re-writing, and re-re writing at least 40-50 hours a week. Our "Art Server" is an array of 3x Promise Pegasus 8-bay servers (we do lotsa art ) and those drives seem to fail more often than on the Qnaps, even though the Qnaps are tuned for speed.

3619C84C-04F9-461D-868C-2102F31FE2E3_1_105_c.jpeg (62.91 KiB) Viewed 1873 times

[Dr_Strangelove]

The art... is INSIDE of the computer, Billy!!

[5chn3ll]

The thermodynamics textbook is a riser for my Macbook when I'm 3D printing crap - but I did bust it out to win an Internet argument several weeks ago (the comments section for “perpetual motion machine” videos is an incredible resource for finding morons). Mrs. S's great-uncle was an uber-nerd, and I wound up inheriting a few of his reference books (like a really cool handbook on gear train design).

The Samsung drives are oversized and the blades don't do a lot of disk i/o, so they tend to last at least a couple of years. I use a pair of 1TB 860 Pros as a RAID-configured read/write cache in each of our production NAS units; they last less than a year in that application.

We're in the process of migrating from the NAS units to a distributed filesystem I've been boring Gnat about for the past year. The Ceph cluster outperforms our Synology NAS units by 50-80x (not %!). Ceph is well-optimized for the way our application uses data. We wind up with a lot of duplicate files, which is typically really slow for NAS units. Duplicates in Ceph are metadata-only operations since there are already redundant copies of the file throughout the cluster, which makes file "duplication" almost instant.

I feel like each one of these pictures is a puzzle. Tell us about Thermodynamics! (Actually, looks like you haven't cracked it yet...)

How often do you have to replace these Samsung drives on a Dell Blade? I have my editors & animators working together off of Qnap 8-bay diskless NAS servers. I'd say we replace a disk or two every year or two. Though, those drives see some serious writing, re-writing, and re-re writing at least 40-50 hours a week. Our "Art Server" is an array of 3x Promise Pegasus 8-bay servers (we do lotsa art ) and those drives seem to fail more often than on the Qnaps, even though the Qnaps are tuned for speed.

[32wildbilly]

The thermodynamics textbook is a riser for my Macbook when I'm 3D printing crap - but I did bust it out to win an Internet argument several weeks ago. Mrs. S's great-uncle was an uber-nerd, and I wound up inheriting a few of his reference books (like a really cool handbook on gear train design).

The Samsung drives are oversized and the blades don't do a lot of disk i/o, so they tend to last at least a couple of years. I use a pair of 1TB 860 Pros as a RAID-configured read/write cache in each of our production NAS units; they last less than a year in that application.

We're in the process of migrating from the NAS units to a distributed filesystem I've been boring Gnat about for the past year. The Ceph cluster outperforms our Synology NAS units by 50-80x (not %!). Ceph is well-optimized for the way our application uses data. We wind up with a lot of duplicate files, which is typically really slow for NAS units. Duplicates in Ceph are metadata-only operations since there are already redundant copies of the file throughout the cluster, which makes file "duplication" almost instant.

I feel like each one of these pictures is a puzzle. Tell us about Thermodynamics! (Actually, looks like you haven't cracked it yet...)

How often do you have to replace these Samsung drives on a Dell Blade? I have my editors & animators working together off of Qnap 8-bay diskless NAS servers. I'd say we replace a disk or two every year or two. Though, those drives see some serious writing, re-writing, and re-re writing at least 40-50 hours a week. Our "Art Server" is an array of 3x Promise Pegasus 8-bay servers (we do lotsa art ) and those drives seem to fail more often than on the Qnaps, even though the Qnaps are tuned for speed.

Got it. So this...

[32wildbilly]

Do they still look like this?

2844A5E8-BAA1-43F1-9BAD-86AFE54AC307.jpeg (78.6 KiB) Viewed 1856 times