A little while back I was honored to be part of the first, inaugural class by Object First, called Aces. I first learned a about Object First during a VeeamON conference and was intrigued by the concept of having object storage in the Datacenter vs cloud.
Geoff from Object First reached out to me and offered to “test-drive” a box in my home-lab. Of course I wouldn’t say no , I mean who would? So this will be the first of a blog series talking Object First and Veeam. Many thanks again for letting me “play” with the box.
I guess I wasn’t quite sure about the dimensions or weight, but the first inclination I had about this is a big box was when FedEx Freight called to schedule delivery! I started to think where am I going to put this, since my home lab is on the smaller side? Anyway, the day came and it was delivered on a pallet. Luckily the dimension and weight included the pallet, so it was a bit lighter than anticipated.
After some pros and cons discussions, I decided to take it to the test-lab at work, where it would be racked and I can throw more load at it.
Unpacking
After moving the box, it was time to unpack it.
One thing I noticed and I don’t know if this is because it was sent as a test-box, but it included instructions and cables to assemble the server. As, in here goes the CPU, here are the cables for the on/off switch and so on. A bit weird and probably will/should not be included when sent to a customer. The server is a standard Supermicro server with a bunch of storage. This one has 64TB. Power Supplies are Deltas and are redundant. (2x)
And finally racked:
Here is a quick video of the server:
Setup
Next step was to complete the initial setup. Currently Object First does not offer a separate management interface. You can vlan, but no dedicated nic. I surely hope this will change in some future iterations. Once we give it a static ip, we create a cluster and put this as it’s first node. Of course we will have to do a software update. I suspect there will be many updates coming, as it is a new product and actively being developed.
Please note a reboot will be necessary. Also note that you might have to accept the certificate in Veeam again, as it seems to change after (at least some) updates. This is for self signed. I did not see a way to install a certificate from a CA; Object First is aware and I’m confident this will be addressed soon.
This concludes the first post on Object First. In my next post I will go through the Veeam integration and some test.
Stay tuned!