I have the unique opportunity to put together a distributed media system for a (ZOMG!) mansion in Newport, RI. It needs to be expandable to serve up to 15 clients (probably not at the same time) and perhaps become the basis of a home automation system.
Seeing as I've never put together a Windows Home Server, I am looking at what hardware req's might be for the project that I'm meant to propose within the week.
The main goals will be:
Reliability
Storage size / performance (I can foresee at times network load due to multiple users)
Ability to act as a home automation controller (probably through mControl) without a hiccup in performance
Ability to act as a media archiver for several hundred (thousand?) dvds/music cds. (or should I have a dedicated archival computer and then just move migrate files from that?)
Normally at home I'd just throw together an Atom based solution with a couple terabytes of storage and call it a day, but I can't be sure of how the scope of this installation changes the equation.
I can't think of anything else, but I'm sure it will come up.
The reason I go to SPCR even though silence isn't a strict requirement is because users from here come from widely varied background in computers so I have the best chance of getting a varied and comprehensive answer.
Thanks!
Luxury Media Server / Archiver
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
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trandy1001
- Posts: 64
- Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2008 7:05 am
- Location: Rhode Island
Re: Luxury Media Server / Archiver
Sell your client a proper big name server if you want reliability. The cheapest ones which have the bells and whistles you'd expect like ECC and remote management ain't that expensive. It'll look like serious business on paper and you won't be the one to blame if the hardware fails.
If the requirements are modest you could go with the cheapest serious-looking server I know: the Proliant Microserver. Power consumption is lower than real servers. It's not SPCR-quiet by any means but it ain't too noisy so it'll be fine in a cupboard or something.
If you want really, really reliable you'll need two servers with the same data. I guess it's hard to set up some form of automatic failover with Windows and it wouldn't be showy so I guess you could have shortcuts for the two servers on people's desktops or something and tell your client to try the second server if the first one doesn't respond. A cold spare would be more reasonable of course. The spare server could also be used as a nearly-offline backup if it's cold: have a script wake it up on schedule (nightly or something), update the spare server with any changes made to the main server and then shut it down. For show, have the script send an email to report success to your client or something.
Do you know the requirements with any more precision than that?
Knowing how many simultaneous users are going to use the server and for what is kind of important! If it's just a handful of people streaming music or DVDs, you should be fine with a simple gigE connection (but watch the wireless bandwitdh in all places where people could want to stream DVDs with their mobile devices).
I don't know how many DVDs Windows can stream simultaneously from a hard drive without messing up so you might need to take a good look at disk performance if the server is supposed to stream to many clients simultaneously. With decent client software it shouldn't be an issue but best assume the worst on that front... which means getting some input from someone knowledgable about the quirks of common video streaming software.
How many DVDs are we talking about? You could put close to a thousand audio CDs on a single-platter 2.5'' drive (that was last year... maybe more now) so mixing DVDs and CDs ain't a good way to estimate the requirements. It doesn't look like we're talking about a whole lot of storage so, capacity-wise, you'll probably fine with 2 data drives (one mirroring the other but no RAID). Make sure you've got the room for more drives if you figure you'll be anywhere close to capacity with the highest-capacity affordable drives on the market.
You'll probably want a UPS and offsite backups for seriousness. Turning off the power in the house while streaming a movie from a laptop should make for a decent show (the actual point is not to risk losing data when you lose power but nevermind).
A remotely manageable UPS is probably overkill but you should get a minimally manageable switch, if only for show (put a shortcut to the switch on your client's desktop or something). Switches are cheap so you could afford a spare but it would be ridiculously overkill to wire the mansion like a bank so I'd just lay the switches side by side and tell your client to move all the cables from one switch to the other switch if the switch dies or acts up.
If the requirements are modest you could go with the cheapest serious-looking server I know: the Proliant Microserver. Power consumption is lower than real servers. It's not SPCR-quiet by any means but it ain't too noisy so it'll be fine in a cupboard or something.
If you want really, really reliable you'll need two servers with the same data. I guess it's hard to set up some form of automatic failover with Windows and it wouldn't be showy so I guess you could have shortcuts for the two servers on people's desktops or something and tell your client to try the second server if the first one doesn't respond. A cold spare would be more reasonable of course. The spare server could also be used as a nearly-offline backup if it's cold: have a script wake it up on schedule (nightly or something), update the spare server with any changes made to the main server and then shut it down. For show, have the script send an email to report success to your client or something.
Do you know the requirements with any more precision than that?
Knowing how many simultaneous users are going to use the server and for what is kind of important! If it's just a handful of people streaming music or DVDs, you should be fine with a simple gigE connection (but watch the wireless bandwitdh in all places where people could want to stream DVDs with their mobile devices).
I don't know how many DVDs Windows can stream simultaneously from a hard drive without messing up so you might need to take a good look at disk performance if the server is supposed to stream to many clients simultaneously. With decent client software it shouldn't be an issue but best assume the worst on that front... which means getting some input from someone knowledgable about the quirks of common video streaming software.
How many DVDs are we talking about? You could put close to a thousand audio CDs on a single-platter 2.5'' drive (that was last year... maybe more now) so mixing DVDs and CDs ain't a good way to estimate the requirements. It doesn't look like we're talking about a whole lot of storage so, capacity-wise, you'll probably fine with 2 data drives (one mirroring the other but no RAID). Make sure you've got the room for more drives if you figure you'll be anywhere close to capacity with the highest-capacity affordable drives on the market.
You'll probably want a UPS and offsite backups for seriousness. Turning off the power in the house while streaming a movie from a laptop should make for a decent show (the actual point is not to risk losing data when you lose power but nevermind).
A remotely manageable UPS is probably overkill but you should get a minimally manageable switch, if only for show (put a shortcut to the switch on your client's desktop or something). Switches are cheap so you could afford a spare but it would be ridiculously overkill to wire the mansion like a bank so I'd just lay the switches side by side and tell your client to move all the cables from one switch to the other switch if the switch dies or acts up.
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trandy1001
- Posts: 64
- Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2008 7:05 am
- Location: Rhode Island
Re: Luxury Media Server / Archiver
HFat wrote:Sell your client a proper big name server if you want reliability. The cheapest ones which have the bells and whistles you'd expect like ECC and remote management ain't that expensive. It'll look like serious business on paper and you won't be the one to blame if the hardware fails.
If the requirements are modest you could go with the cheapest serious-looking server I know: the Proliant Microserver. Power consumption is lower than real servers. It's not SPCR-quiet by any means but it ain't too noisy so it'll be fine in a cupboard or something.
If you want really, really reliable you'll need two servers with the same data. I guess it's hard to set up some form of automatic failover with Windows and it wouldn't be showy so I guess you could have shortcuts for the two servers on people's desktops or something and tell your client to try the second server if the first one doesn't respond. A cold spare would be more reasonable of course. The spare server could also be used as a nearly-offline backup if it's cold: have a script wake it up on schedule (nightly or something), update the spare server with any changes made to the main server and then shut it down. For show, have the script send an email to report success to your client or something.
Do you know the requirements with any more precision than that?
Knowing how many simultaneous users are going to use the server and for what is kind of important! If it's just a handful of people streaming music or DVDs, you should be fine with a simple gigE connection (but watch the wireless bandwitdh in all places where people could want to stream DVDs with their mobile devices).
I don't know how many DVDs Windows can stream simultaneously from a hard drive without messing up so you might need to take a good look at disk performance if the server is supposed to stream to many clients simultaneously. With decent client software it shouldn't be an issue but best assume the worst on that front... which means getting some input from someone knowledgable about the quirks of common video streaming software.
How many DVDs are we talking about? You could put close to a thousand audio CDs on a single-platter 2.5'' drive (that was last year... maybe more now) so mixing DVDs and CDs ain't a good way to estimate the requirements. It doesn't look like we're talking about a whole lot of storage so, capacity-wise, you'll probably fine with 2 data drives (one mirroring the other but no RAID). Make sure you've got the room for more drives if you figure you'll be anywhere close to capacity with the highest-capacity affordable drives on the market.
You'll probably want a UPS and offsite backups for seriousness. Turning off the power in the house while streaming a movie from a laptop should make for a decent show (the actual point is not to risk losing data when you lose power but nevermind).
A remotely manageable UPS is probably overkill but you should get a minimally manageable switch, if only for show (put a shortcut to the switch on your client's desktop or something). Switches are cheap so you could afford a spare but it would be ridiculously overkill to wire the mansion like a bank so I'd just lay the switches side by side and tell your client to move all the cables from one switch to the other switch if the switch dies or acts up.
It will be in its own data room, so SPCR quiet is by no means important. I honestly don't see more than 4-5 video and music clients at once with an additional 2 music streams. I can't see disk performance being the bottleneck as RAID 5 seems to scale rather well, and I'll probably be running at least 4 2tb drives. +1 SSD for OS
As far as reliability goes, I had actually considered a mirrored backup server, but I want to keep my initial cost basis to a sane number so it will be a down the line "expandability" option. A UPS is a must and has already been accounted for in the parts line.
It is fairly certain that there will be a huge library of blu-ray rips (I think he already has like 5-600 DVDs, but seemed interested in archiving a much bigger collection since it doesn't require physical space), so that will most likely be the bulk of the data unless the client really wants it to serve as an automated back-up to his pwn personal computers. Music size nowadays is almost inconsequential. Quality of the content (think .flac and full dvd/BR rips with menus) is of importance as well so that ups the number of hard drives needed.
I plan on throwing together a few cheap 7 media center setups which I plan on streamlining the interface for, and I already found a pretty decent app to control by iPad via wifi and a plugin. Also, he's got a ridiculous Direct TV setup, but I might suggest a pooled HD HomeRun Prime solution since the whole thing is already wired for Cat5 and the cable cost may be much less than $800 a month for satellite.
I might use Sonos for audio-only applications, but if you can think of a better/ more cost effective way that might accomplish the same things (multi-zone syncing, ipod support, ipad control), let me know. Sonos also has the advantage of a mesh type network, which would help cover a 40,000 sq. ft. area.
Re: Luxury Media Server / Archiver
Of course the disks are going to be the bottleneck! What else? Are you planning to transcode in real-time or something?
Hard drives have terrible random performance and RAID5's random access performance is particularly poor. Just imagine what could happen if your client uploads something (like a bunch of new rips) while a couple of people are streaming movies. Windows could manage this situation intelligently but my (admittedly outdated) experience with it makes me a bit uneasy. I'm not saying you're necessarily going to have disk performance issues (it shouldn't be terribly hard to write software that works around the problem) but that, if you're going to have any performance issues with the server, they'll most likely come from random disk access. People who like to burn money sometimes use SSDs as disk cache to alleviate that problem.
RAID ain't necessarily your only option. Just a warning about RAID: I hear Windows users turn to hardware RAID and that means your data won't be accessible if you don't have a spare server (or enough spare parts). And even then RAID5 ain't the safest thing. Backups are paramount.
And backups aren't gong to be cheap. If you have really dependable off-site backups with the features necessary to make sure the pipe isn't going to be saturated if someone renames a directory or something, you could possibly dispense with local backups. If you're going to have local backups, remember you should deduce the cost of the local backups from the cost of second server for the purpose of determining the cost of the reliability you gain with a spare server (because it could be used for local backups).
It hardly matters but putting the OS on a SSD is kinda pointless. Everything useful (which is not much considering you're setting up a glorified NAS) should be cached in RAM if the OS has any sense. I don't imagine you're going to skimp on RAM.
Hard drives have terrible random performance and RAID5's random access performance is particularly poor. Just imagine what could happen if your client uploads something (like a bunch of new rips) while a couple of people are streaming movies. Windows could manage this situation intelligently but my (admittedly outdated) experience with it makes me a bit uneasy. I'm not saying you're necessarily going to have disk performance issues (it shouldn't be terribly hard to write software that works around the problem) but that, if you're going to have any performance issues with the server, they'll most likely come from random disk access. People who like to burn money sometimes use SSDs as disk cache to alleviate that problem.
RAID ain't necessarily your only option. Just a warning about RAID: I hear Windows users turn to hardware RAID and that means your data won't be accessible if you don't have a spare server (or enough spare parts). And even then RAID5 ain't the safest thing. Backups are paramount.
And backups aren't gong to be cheap. If you have really dependable off-site backups with the features necessary to make sure the pipe isn't going to be saturated if someone renames a directory or something, you could possibly dispense with local backups. If you're going to have local backups, remember you should deduce the cost of the local backups from the cost of second server for the purpose of determining the cost of the reliability you gain with a spare server (because it could be used for local backups).
It hardly matters but putting the OS on a SSD is kinda pointless. Everything useful (which is not much considering you're setting up a glorified NAS) should be cached in RAM if the OS has any sense. I don't imagine you're going to skimp on RAM.