asked on

NAS Storage Solution

I have just been assigned a project to research, design, and implement a network storage solution for our company. We are moving towards a paperless office so file servers are greatly needed. I am looking for suggestions/ideas for a storage solution with the following requirements:

Clustered Drives for redundancy
Terabyte - size drives (probably start with ~2 terabytes of storage)
Integrated windows Authentication (to allow for providing access using shared folders)
Gigabit Ethernet
Upgradeable storage size

Ideally this would be a blade server so it won't take up a lot of space on our racks. I don't think money will be too much of an issue - i've got a budget of around 30K.

Thanks

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

prof666

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

patrick24

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

durindil

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

nyck6623

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

rj-smith

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

mgcIT

ASKER

hey thanks for the replies.... I've been doing a lot of research so sorry it's taken me so long to respond. I've got a question about Netapp - does it use its own OS, or does it run Windows Storage Server 2003? If it's not a Windows OS, how easy is it to set up and does it easily integrate with our Domain users/pass?

rj-smith

The NetApp Filer's uses a proprietary operating system called Data ONTAP which has many unique features. Data ONTAP had a volume snapshot feature long before Volume Shadow Copy arrived in Windows 2003 for example.

Although there are lots of commands you can use with Data ONTAP's command line interface you can do most things with the web front end which is obviously far easier to get to grips with. NetApp have a number of courses you can attend if you want to learn more about the O/S.

Hope that helps.

SOLUTION

Pide

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

mgcIT

ASKER

thanks for all the advice.. It has helped out a lot with my research.