Each week we release a 45Drives Tech Tip from one of our team members. These short tech tips videos cover some of the most frequently asked questions we receive from storage users, customers. fans and followers. We cover topics such as network bonding with CentOS, Storinator on the Cloud, using Ansible for your IT infrastructure, and the direct-wired architecture of…
Some people are under the impression – if it’s free, it can’t be enterprise. We’re here to tell you that’s not correct. Although Ceph is free, it carries some amazing features that validate its enterprise capabilities. In this blog, I want to focus on the Ceph dashboard and its features. What makes the dashboard so amazing?When you log into your Ceph cluster,…
How to Protect Your Data Using ZFS A question often asked in the server industry is, ‘what’s better - software RAID or hardware RAID?’ If you research this topic, a lot of the information about RAID suggests that a hardware RAID card is preferable to using a Software RAID. But I don’t agree. In my opinion is that, for most…
In this blog and the series of blogs to follow I will focus solely on Ceph Clustering. Many people are intimidated by Ceph because they find it complex – but when you understand it, that’s not the case. I want you to leave this blog with a better understanding of what Ceph is and why you should use it –…
We build some pretty awesome storage servers or at least that’s what our customers and fans say about us! We like to think it’s because our Storinators solve their storage issues by holding huge amounts of data, they’re incredibly fast and …wait for it… they are affordable! So, after hearing some feedback from our fans it was only a matter…
All of our Storinator Massive Storage Servers, as well as many other computers, have a remote management interface called Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI). In this blog, I’m going to explain how to set up IPMI so that you can do certain things remotely, such as turning your server on and off, monitoring your Power Supply Unit statistics, as well as troubleshooting and…
How to build a Petabyte cluster using GlusterFS with ZFS running on Storinator massive storage servers If you checked out our recent video on clustering, you may have seen me keep a high-speed file transfer going, while I did just about everything I could think of that would give a system administrator nightmares. I was pulling out drives, yanking out network cables…
At 45 Drives, we make really large capacity storage servers. When we first started out, our machines were relatively slow, and focused on cold-to-lukewarm storage applications; but our users pushed us to achieve more performance and reliability. This drove the evolution of our direct-wired architecture, which delivers enterprise level speed (read/write in excess of 3 Gigabytes/second) and reliability, without losing the simplicity…
At 45 Drives, the FreeNAS network attached storage operating system is a popular choice to run our high performance massive storage pods. It combines the advantages of the modern ZFS copy on write file system, with the simplicity of a purpose-built GUI driven NAS appliance shell. Until today, whenever a customer received a Storinator running FreeNAS it would be configured with a…
Thomas Kay founded Tom's Computer Support in 2001 with the goal of providing the type of professional IT support larger companies enjoy to small businesses in Pennsylvania. Applying his experience working in marketing, sales, as well as IT at many local companies, Thomas quickly built a reputation as being a knowledgeable and trustworthy IT industry expert. He shares his expertise…