Friday, December 29, 2006

low power high performance NFS server

Thought I would update a post with my current favorite system for use as a home NFS server.

I bought a Via Jetway J7F4 board, which has a 1.2GHz Via Eden processor, dual gigabit networks, SATA, etc. all in a mini-ITX form-factor. I put this into a microATX case, along with an optical drive, a pair of 200GB SATA drives, a single PATA drive (for the OS), 1GB RAM, and a US Robotics gigE PCI card.

Add Solaris 10 06/06, and ZFS, and this is nearly an ideal server for my work needs. This was the first time I've used ZFS, and I'm very impressed so far.

The good: very low power consumption (<40W total, I think), quiet, 22MB/sec NFS, 200GB mirrored (using ZFS, not h/w raid), $500 total price, plus Solaris so I can do extra things like run an NIS server.

The bad: the fanless Via C7 got too hot at 1.2GHz, so underclocked it at 1.0GHz to avoid hangs, onboard gigE not supported (yet -- am working with engineering at Sun to fix that).

What I would change: my next system will use a 1.5GHz J7F2 board (with fan), which trades the onboard gigE for additional port options, while allowing me to use a daughtercard with gigE.

What I want from Solaris: support for the onboard rtl8110sc gigE (in progress), support for the on-chip crypto (Via Padlock)

2 comments:

jamesd_wi said...

Welcome to the blogging world.

Andy said...

Hey there,

Any news on these two integrations for this board?