Hi everyone.
I'm new and I'm going to do a major update to my home network.
Actual configuration
Right now I'm happy with a 12 core ES Xeon with a 3Ware 9650SE RAID controller (awesome controller IMHO) and (wait for it) 12x 8TB SATA disks (RAID 6) running Linux.
The major drawback is that I want to move to a "better" configuration (partly because I like the work, partly because I found this setup a bit crude).
My current setup uses a two port 1GBe ethernet), both interfaces are bonded.
I'm thinking to move to something else
An old i5-3450 board (4 cores Sandy bridge, high TDP) or a G4560 (2 cores Skylake with HT, low TDP), the same RAID, a Mellanox ConnectX 10GBe, OpenMediaVault.
I'd "recycle" the 12 core Xeon as the front server (a 2 port Marvell 10GBe is on the way); my final goal is having the "CPU intensive stuff" on my frontend server while accessing the data from the backend one (the openmediavault box) via something (iSCSI, FCoE or I don't know... is AoE still around ?).
I know it's possible and since I'm doing it just for the sake of experimenting I can try until it just works but I'm not really sure about possible hardware caps with CPU, network or just protocol limitations.
I'd run the backend server "back-to-back" with the frontend, direct connection without switches and so, I'd like to know how much CPU power is required (RAID-wise it should be zero since the 3Ware do it's stuff by itself).
Both Mellanox ConnectX-2 and the Broadcom cards seems to support full iSCSI offloading (on paper, I'm still bound to driver implementation and support for advanced features).
The final goal should be having the second 10GBe interface sharing data to my LAN at full speed via NFS / SMB / others well north of 200MB/s, enough to use the backend's RAID as an "almost local" disk for the rest in my net.
Help, suggestions etc are welcome.
Thank you for your time.