This week Chris and Martin discuss the subject of storage for home and homelabs.  With so much content being personally generated these days, is it better to store data on local hardware or use the public cloud?  It turns out that many of the home storage devices we’re familiar with are pushing more to SMB and enterprise-class features.

Alternatively, if you’re like Martin, you could build your own solution from drives, Linux and an ATX chassis.  A quick check online shows both HDDs and SSDs for sale.  Are users being careful about wiping their data before selling?  We’ll revisit this subject in a few weeks and find out.

For homelabs, there are so many options.  Home NAS platforms will export iSCSI and NFS.  Alternatively, solutions can be built from open source software.  There are even simulators for many of the older storage platforms.  These provide for the ability to learn about storage solutions or test things out in a non-production environment.

Here are links to the simulators and other software we discussed:

* Dell EMC Unity

* Dell EMC Isilon Simulator

* NetApp ONTAP Simulator (login required)

* Ceph

* Gluster

* Lustre

* Synology Cloud Sync

Elapsed Time: 00:28:15

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros

* 00:00:20 – Blue Monday!

* 00:02:00 – Why use home storage with public cloud availability?

* 00:03:30 – People are starting to store terabytes of personal data

* 00:04:00 – Is storage too cheap to bother being organised?

* 00:04:30 – What are the home NAS options?  Buy or build?

* 00:07:30 – Make sure you backup and backup again!

* 00:09:30 – Can home NAS devices tier to the public cloud?

* 00:11:30 – Turns out Synology is pretty fully featured!

* 00:14:00 – What about encryption and data destruction?

* 00:16:00 – Default encrypt when uploading to cloud?

* 00:17:00 – Checking out cheap SSDs on Ebay

* 00:19:00 – What are the storage options for a home lab?

* 00:21:00 – What could you build with open source?

* 00:22:30 – There are also storage software simulators

* 00:27:00 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

*  Home Lab: Building VM Images

 

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