Izerion

The first article for my blog. I know i’m a bit late to this party but whatever, this blog is mostly for the people I know, so they can follow what i’m doing.

Last week I got the new hardware for my new music server. The old one was getting cpu overheat errors and the disks were getting full. I also didn’t feel like upgrading because I wanted to move to rack-mounted equipment (for the coolness factor) and more redundancy. Redundancy is probably the most important reason for this project, I’ve literally put weeks (maybe months) of work in my collection to get all the tags right, no doubles, etc., etc.. One of the other important points to look at was disk-space, but I think I got that one covered right now.

The first step in this project, getting server-grade hardware at a consumer-grade price, was probably the hardest, or so I thought. After asking around for second-hand hardware I didn’t really get any satisfying result. I could get some empty 4U rackmount cases, but they didn’t have a hot-swappable SCSI or SATA backplane. Besides that, 4U is just too much. Anything you can fit in 4U, you can also fit in a 2U case.

After a lot of thinking, searching Ebay, thinking, searching Ebay, I decided to contact the company which also supplies my work equipment and asked them if they could build anything for a nice price for a private project. They were willing to help and got me a nice Supermicro 6025B-8B. It’s equiped with 1 Intel Xeon 5060 Dempsey 3.2GHz, 4GB Apacer FFB Memory and 6 Seagate Cheetah 10K.7 73GB harddisks.

The server part was now taken care of. Next was the storage. I knew we had an unused EasyRAID S16 at work. This is a 16 disk storage cabinet for SATA disks. It supports hardware raid 0 to 50 and connects to the server using SCSI. After asking what the plans were, I could take it. Not that hard after all.

Expect some more blogging soon as I’m going to put this all into one big flightcase.