Build your own NAS for 66K

One of the hottest selling products in the enterprise space today is NAS.
while there are lots of vendors to choose from, there is one more
alternative--to build one on your own. When our own 1 TB NAS was full, we
decided to get a little adventurous. The thought of building one was more exciting
than buying a commercial one. So like good analysts, the first step we took was
to do a requirement analysis, and this is what we came up with. We wanted a NAS
which had about a TB of storage space with redundancy, could be mounted in our
server rack , would connect to our 1 Gbps backbone, join our existing Directory
Services (essentially LDAP), and have an easy to use Web based management
interface. 

An extensive research for all this brought us to the conclusion that
everything was easily available except the server cabinet. Actually. in India
the concept of assembled rack mountable servers is still in its infancy. As a
result there is no known mass manufacturer of such cabinets. 

We did a week's long search in different computer markets including Nehru
Place, and figured that there are some local manufacturers who build such
cabinets and sell them. We got hold of one of them and got two different prices
for a standard 2U cabinet, which could hold upto five hard disks. The prices
were Rs 12,000 and 14,000 depending on whether you opted for railings with the
server or not. The railings are basically two sliding iron plates which get
fixed on both sides of the server and lets it slide out and in from the Server
Rack. We opted for a cabinet with railings. 

The next task was to get a motherboard, which can connect 5 SATA HDDs and
have RAID 5 support. We found an MSI board (MSI P965 Platinum) that fulfilled
our requirements. Rest was easy to get-300 GB HDDs, processor, RAM, etc.

There is one more element missing in our component list -hot swap option
for HDDs. But this requires a special cabinet that's difficult to find in the
market, and is quite expensive. What we've built is a very basic NAS box. Here's
how we did it.

Display Card

The shape of our cabinet didn't allow us to connect the AGP card so we had
to connect a VGA cable (taken from an old mobo) from the card to the cabinet.
But this requires a bit of soldering. So if you want to avoid this, make sure
your NAS mobo has an in-built display card

Processor

You need at least a P4 2.8 or 3.0 GHz CPU for your NAS. In our shootout, all
NAS boxes came with P4 processors and one even had a Core 2 Duo

Cabling

Tie the wires inside the cabinet properly so that they don't block air flow
inside the device

RAM

Atleast DDR II 1024 MB is required for your NAS to work properly but keep
the option open for scalability by keeping some RAM slots free

Heat Sensor

Try to get a cabinet which monitors the cabinet temperature from different
regions. It will help to keep your NAS cool

Hard Disk

Avoid using multiple hard-disk controllers if you are going for a RAID card.
Connect all the disks into it only or connect all of them

to the motherboard

Cabinet FANs

While selecting a cabinet, make sure it has ample fans for cooling every part of the cabinet

Fan & Temp Controller

Besides fans, go for temperature controller . The one we got had a separate
controller that can set temp warning level and fan speed for the cabinet. It
also has an LED panel that displays inside temperatures

Anindya Roy with Vijay Chauhan

Installing the OS

After assembling the system, configure the RAID Level on top of the hard
disk. You can choose any level of RAID supported by your motherboard. Our
motherboard gave us the choice of using RAID Levels 0 to 5 and 10. As RAID 5 is
best suited for jobs that need redundancy with performance, we opted for it. We
dedicated one 300 GB HDD for the OS, OS backup and applications and built a RAID
5 array of the other four disks. The logic behind keeping a separate HDD for OS
hard disk is simple-if your OS is damaged, your still data volume still
remains. Also at any point of time, you can fix a new HDD, install the OS and
your NAS is ready. After building the RAID volume, we got a redundant single
partition of 860 GB. The loss of space is due to the parity done by the RAID
partition.

The next step is to install Windows 2003 R2 on top of the device. This is
similar to installing Windows on any machine except one thing. When the

installation starts, you have to press F6 and specify the RAID Controller's
driver to Windows. You can obtain the driver for your RAID controller from the
Driver CD of the motherboard.

To create a new share of any type (NFS, HTTP, SMB or DFS), all you have to do is to go to this link and provide the path and filename of the share and then select the protocol

Once Windows 2003 R2 is installed all you need is to install two more
components. These are the set-up files for Appliance Kit and Storage Server
Feature Pack. You can download both from Microsoft's website. After
downloading, first install the Appliance Kit and then the Storage Server Feature
Pack. Installation is straightforward and you just have to follow the wizard.
After all this is done, reboot the machine and you NAS is ready to rock.

Configuration

There are two different ways in which you can configure this NAS. As this is a
Windows NAS, you can always log on to Windows and configure it. But won't you
rather like to configure it remotely without the need of logging in to the OS?
Thats where the Appliance Kit and Storage Server feature pack caome in. They
install a management portal on top of the NAS that you can access from any
browser remotely.

Set quota for users by going to this link and selecting the name of the user. Then you can specify the warning and restrict level of the user from the same interface

By default, this portal runs on https://:8098. From this
window, you can do almost all types of NAS related configurations like creating
users, groups, volumes and partitions, making shares and assigning rights, etc.

You can even directly run remote desktop on top of Explorer or
shutdown/reboot the server.