The NAS of our mobile studio
Our Autres(M)Ondes mobile studio integrates for a while a NAS server dedicated to rivendell mysql and files. The first steps to set up a such server are described into the Rivendell wiki page Setting up a dedicated Rivendell MySQL and audio store server.
Hardware
Here are some details on our NAS hardware :
- a micro-ATX mother-board with a 2.8Ghz Pentium and 512MB of RAM
- three 160GB IDE disks, each one with a dedicated IDE controler
- a striped lvm volume for /var/snd which delivers 100MB/s
- several volumes dedicated to current event files, broadcast recording, …
- a gigabit network interface
We removed the DVD writer .. the DVD creation fails too easily under the load of 2/3 gigabit clients.
Software
The software configuration is based on a Debian etch.
LVM, mysql, nfs-kernel-server make up the storage system but no samba server. It manages the 480GB of storage.
The NFS sharing is reserved to the applications (rivendell, various daemons …). Direct NFS accesses are forbidden to normal users. They manipulate files through ftp/http servers. They “checkout” the wanted file on their workstation and “ckeckin” the result. It prevents most of unwanted overridings. The Rivendell /var/snd directory is never accessed directly. We work into a tree directory dedicated to each event. A larger description of our content management method should be the subject of a future post.
With storage, the second role of our nas is running a large set of asynchronous processings : ogg creation and AudioBank uploads, flac archiving, broadcast recording archiving, automatic imports into rivendell, … The 2.8Ghz processor is very busy. Our cron scripts need to check the system load to avoid too many parallel operations. All these processings will require a dedicated post too.
The third role of your nas is the supervision : munin, nagios2, logcheck and mail notifications are centralized in the server. Disk spaces, system load, critical processes, network latencies, … are monitored on three main systems and on satellites (when available).
Future upgrades
The next planned upgrades on our nas are :
- upgrade the (old) IDE disks into a RAID 1 SATA disks set
- test performances with more RAM
- migrate our cron scripts on rake
- find a smaller and lighter rack mount
Tags: audiobank, compress, cron, etch, gigabit, lvm, munin, mysql, nagios, nas, nfs, rivendell, storage, studio