I have been lurking on this community for a while now and have really enjoyed the informational and instructional posts but a topic I don’t see come up very often is scaling and hoarding. Currently, I have a 20TB server which I am rapidly filling and most posts talking about expanding recommend simply buying larger drives and slotting them in to a single machine. This definitely is the easiest way to expand, but seems like it would get you to about 100TB before you cant reasonably do that anymore. So how do you set up 100TB+ networks with multiple servers?
My main concern is that currently all my services are dockerized on a single machine running Ubuntu, which works extremely well. It is space efficient with hardlinking and I can still seed back everything. From different posts I’ve read, it seems like as people scale they either give up on hardlinks and then eat up a lot of their storage with copying files or they eventually delete their seeds and just keep the content. Does the Arr suite and Qbit allow dynamically selecting servers based on available space? Or are there other ways to solve these issues with additional tools? How do you guys set up large systems and what recommendations would you make? Any advice is appreciated from hardware to software!
Also, huge shout out to Saik0 from this thread: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/24219297 I learned a ton from his post, but it seemed like the tip of the iceberg!
I second the super micro picks. They are relatively cheap and super reliable.
Currently I run a 36 bay 4u supermicro server. It runs unraid because I’m lazy and it seems to handle the mismatched disks really well. Most of my stuff is now docker containers out of laziness. But I prefer VMs for production services. I built this box to also be able to handle external SAS cards in case I need to add another shelf. But I really wish unraid would support multiple pools of their main storage type. But I hope to replace all my disks with 22tb before I get to the next shelf.
I used to run a 7 node ceph server for my storage. Which has a ton of benefits going into data warehouse stages. But it ended up being more frustrating than I needed. At least 5 years ago when I was running it.