Meet HOMER the file server

This is HOMER. His full name is Heavy Overkill of Mandatory Expectations and Requirements. His task is to store all the household files, including those of Sideshow Bob (my ESXi server) using a combination of iSCSI, NFS and CIFS. Once in production, he’ll be running FreeNAS.

With the  SuperChassis 826BE16-R920LPB 2U storage chassis, he’s smaller than expected on the outside. But it’s the inside which counts:

These are Homers internal components. If you want a really good look, you should click the image to see it in full resolution.
Mainboard: Supermicro motherboard X9SRL-F (Single Xeon E5 6xSATA 8xDIMM LGA2011)
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1620 v2 (4-core, 3.7GHz)
RAM: SM Hynix 16GB DDR3-1866 2Rx4 ECC REG DIMM x4 (64 GB total)
HBA: Supermicro PCIe SAS 6Gbps contr, 8int, IR, RAID 0, 1 & 1E, LSI2308
Extra NIC: Supermicro PCI-e 2-port Intel i350 Gigabit Ethernet LAN card, Low-Pro
SSD: 2x Samsung SSD SM843 Series 2.5″ 120GB SATA 6Gbps
HDD: 12x Western Digital RE Enterprise 2TB, SATA3 (comparison chart)

This is the back side of Homer’s chassis. There’s a redundant PSU, PS/2 ports for mouse & keyboard, 100Mbit/s ethernet port dedicated for the IPMI KVM over LAN feature, a serial port, VGA port, and two 1gbps onboard ethernet ports.

This picture shows a temporary hook-up of the server in a new rack. It’ll be much prettier once I get a hold of properly sized cables and do some cable management! But that’s for another post.

I’m currently in the process of doing many performance tests on him, which will be posted separately as they complete. Stay tuned!