I am looking at possibly using Storage Spaces in Server 2012R2 to build a NAS off of. I am looking to build a fairly large unit, 12-14 HDDs, in a "RAID10" like setup (I know storage spaces does not do RAID10, but something similar too it), with a SSD for caching.
And I am looking to maybe hook another external JBOD enclosure to this in the future, for a "RAID5-6" like setup.
I don't plan on doing decompression or de-duplication.
My question is, what kind of hardware would I want for this? Would a small Xeon or Opteron be able to handle it? Or should I shoot for a larger 2.4GHZ+ Xeon 4-core HT, or 12 core Opteron, or even go dual cpus? And how much memory would the system need for optimal performance? I have been searching for hardware guidelines from Microsoft for Storage Spaces setups, but I have been unable to find anything, so if anyone knows of some please point me in the right direction.
I was considering setting these units up with FreeNAS, or another Linux based alternative, but most of the IT professionals in my department, have little to no Linux experience, and in case I get hit by a bus they would prefer a Windows based solution if possible. In that same token, is anyone aware of performance comparisons of FreeNAS or other Linux NAS alternatives, VS. Windows Server 2012R2 Storage Spaces?
Best Answer
CPU and memory requirements are negligible if you're not using dedupe. Any modern CPU and at least 4GB RAM should be sufficient, assuming we're talking about 1GbE. If you're talking about 10GbE, then hardware matters more, but not because of storage spaces.
Obviously the more memory you can add, the more caching can be done, but for low load usage, you don't need a ton.