Well, it’s been a long time coming but the IT transformation and datacenter modernization initiative is almost complete. Decommisioning the half-rack of gear, three EMC AX series storage arrays, three PowerEdge servers and two Powervault tape libraries. Must say, it’s a lot quieter in the server room, not to mention definitely cooler and a major reduction in power usage.
Replacing it all, it seems amazing how far technology has come. Everything is running on an Intel NUC with more memory than everything combined in the server cabinet. That along with an NVMe SSD and an Intel Core i7 processor. The old MacMini is running as a standby and all storage is now migrated to a Synology 1515+ NAS with the older Drobo as a replication target. Tape has been dumped in favor of cloud based backups, basically Amazon CloudDrive, easty to do when you have gigibit fiber now.
Best of all, everything is now virtualized running ESXi. 6.7 on the NUC and 6.7 on the MacMini as a backup. The old test box being the legacy Dell Precision Workstation 690 can only support ESXi 5.5 but that’s just for dorking around with. The NUC runs Plex and Roon, media and audio applications, along with a two-factor authenticated SSH server and a graphical remote desktop.
After some storage cleanup, I’m now using about ~6+TB of storage on the Synology and has been consistently holding there. While I use Roon for audio at home in the media room, I’m been using the Synology audio server and the DS audio client to stream MP3’s to the phone when on the go. Got a Docker container running AirVideo, a WebDav server that I start manually when needed. Also running the CloudSync app to Amazon CloudDrive.
Last but not least which is on the wishlist, an external graphics processor (eGPU) connected to the NUC for Plex transcoding. Doing multiple streams in 4K while ripping is gonna need that. Been following some threads of sucessful eGPU/NUC configs out there.
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