I tape a piece of paper with important info to the top of the server… Top outside, not the inside because I don’t want it to block any airflow.

Paper is cheap and doesn’t need batteries, and I don’t need to look for the info when I need it.

Yep, that is the one!

IIRC it was pretty reasonable for resources too.

I caught a mistake, it is Starwinds san and there was a full-featured free version. They seem to have updated their page so I am less familiar with the new vsan software so dig into it if you are curious.

I did spin up ESOS as well and that is a fairly simple thing to start up if you just want to try and build a volume to test out.

Your t620 is an AMD APU with some sata and PCIe. You can probably just put in an SSD to see how it goes and scale up to new/bigger hardware if you want.

I know that I still have a bunch of FC hardware and it is pretty cool tech. Super low latency purpose built storage protocol.

The biggest thing about SAN is you are now handling block storage instead of file, so there are some logical and workflow differences you need to wrap your head around.

You can share these volumes over iscsi (ethernet) or fibre channel quite easily, but most people use iscsi because it is really easy to put it on its own subnet/VLAN on your existing switch to get it running as opposed to buying FC cards and a separate switch.

You should really always keep iscsi on its own VLAN to keep other network traffic from destroying your performance…

If you are just mucking about I would suggest just getting a couple of SSD and an optiplex sff for cheap.

Software you could start with the SolarWinds san as it is pretty easy to set up.

If you want to keep a San as a purpose built device, definitely look into ESOS (enterprise storage os) as it supports a lot of hardware (nvme) and is capable of scaling up to enterprise levels.

You also don’t need an absurd amount of hardware for a San… You might be raising the bar if you want nvme but you need very little ram and basically just a relatively modern cpu.

Read up on a few of these blog posts on the hardware he deploys to test ESOS and you’ll get some comparison points. https://marcitland.blogspot.com/2017/05/millions-of-iops-with-esos-nvme.html?m=1