Looking for opinions on new home networking hardware


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I was torn between hardware, and internet/networking sub-forums, but since this is more a hardware question, thought this went here.

 

I currently have a Lian Li PC-a77FB case with 4x super micro 5-in-3 carriers:

post-26332-0-74138200-1373402587.jpg

 

This currently does the following tasks

5 x 3TB drives in RAID 5 for Home Theater storage

4 x 2TB drives in RAID-10 for VM's of Exchange, My website, and other things (running around 10VM's at the moment)

2 x 2TB drives in RAID-1 for backups of all my machines

2x 3TB and 1x 2TB hot spares for the above arrays, in case of drive failure

 

All these feed off one LSI-9260-8I controller.    I've worked in IT for a long time (currently work at a Cloud backup company), and I'm starting to worry about the integrity of this system, running so much off one controller,mobo, etc, so I'm looking at expanding it out into a small rack environment. I work with HP equipment at work and hate it, I've worked with Dell in the past and love it.   So here is what I was thinking of doing, and wanted your opinions:

 

I can get a Dell Poweredge R220 for ~700$.  It's haswell, so it'll use less power than an older 1950.  Fill this with 2x 4TB drives in a RAID 1 array, and run either Windows Server 2012 or FreeNAS and use it strictly as my backup server.   This would then have 2 x 4TB external drives connected to it, running sync software to get copies of the server onto the external drives, independently.   The Backup server is incredibly mportant, as I use it for storing all my photography work, code I've written, and backups of my exchange, website, desktop and laptop. I was considering a DIY approach with a Norco RPC-1204, but the end cost would be nearly as much as the Dell, and I can get a 3yr warranty with the Dell, so it's a better option (plus ILO)

 

Getting a 2U poweredge 420 or older 2950 to use for the media server, and running RAID 10/RAID 5 off of it using newer 4 - 6 TB drives.  This would only function as the media server, nothing else.

 

 

And last, getting a R320 or equivalent (maybe another 1950 used) and using that later for my VMs.

 

This would net me 3 servers, and would remove one box being a point of failure for everything going down, as well as get my backup solution entirely off the same box as everything else.  Does this sound like a fair plan, or is there another option I should think about?

 

I haven't been on here in a while, but as always, Thanks in advance!

 

 

 

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If you work for a cloud backup company, do you get some kind of perks allowing you to have a large cloud plan ?
Before I ditched them, I had an unlimited account with JustCloud - I now have a 60GB OneDrive, which is all I need for pics.
Other stuff, I don't care if I lose because I can always re-download.  I understand your needs are different, but one would think you could put much of this stuff online, and then store everything else on your 4TB drives...
 

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If you work for a cloud backup company, do you get some kind of perks allowing you to have a large cloud plan ?

Before I ditched them, I had an unlimited account with JustCloud - I now have a 60GB OneDrive, which is all I need for pics.

Other stuff, I don't care if I lose because I can always re-download.  I understand your needs are different, but one would think you could put much of this stuff online, and then store everything else on your 4TB drives...

 

We make/sell physical appliances (basically a Server that you rack in your infrastructure) that makes local backups, then sends them offsite to the cloud, we're beta testing a Direct to cloud system now, but it's not quite ready, so I'd still have to use another server (or run a VM of the solution) to use my companies services).   I thought about that, but I don't really need cloud backups yet (maybe for my code and images), but I'm more concerned with having single points of failure, hence breaking out the one server into 3 (or 2, and combining media storage along with the VMs into 1 box), then using the 1U box with RAID 1 + 2 external drives as my backup solution short term, until our direct to cloud offering is available.

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