Here at Krystal we are always busy behind the scenes improving our infrastructure. We are currently in the process of building and testing the first of our new backup machines. The idea is to provide as much reliable storage as cheaply as possible to run our incremental backups that are available to every user inside the cPanel. Read on for a few more details!
A quick preview of us getting our hands on all the new gear:
Software
Before we get into all of the shiny hardware, a quick word about software!
The integrity and resiliency of our data are the most important things when it comes to our backups. When it comes to file systems that provide integrity and resiliency it’s almost impossible to look past ZFS and this is what we have decided to go for. This will provide us with a solid base to host multiple instances of R1Soft server backup for our cPanel clients to use!
Hardware
This machine is a bit of a beast, it requires 4 power supplies to keep it running! Here are the brief specifications:
CPU: 16 Cores at 2.6GHz each (2 x E5-2670 Intel Xeon)
Mem: 192GB ( 24 x 8GB )
Network: 2 x 10Gb cards
Disks:
Boot drives:
2 x 256GB SSD drives from different manufactures in Raid 1
Backup storage:
3 x LSI SATA controllers with 16 channels
48 x 3TB SATA drives in ZFS RAIDZ2 with
4 x 256GB SSD drives as read cache
This will give us roughly 108 TB of usable space with 1TB of SSD caching.
To put this into perspective, our current backup server that services most of our shared servers uses around 20TB !
Pictures
SSD Drives:
Motherboard with 192GB of ram and both CPUs:
1 box of 3 – 3TB SATA drives in caddies waiting to go:
A lot of memory:
