Bill H
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NAS Solution for Small Business
I'm looking for an affordable storage device for a small business (About 10 users). Looking for some redundancy (raid-1 or raid-5) and something that is reliable and under 300.
Any suggestions would be great!
Any suggestions would be great!
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The smallest raid 5 I'd mess with is 5 drives in a Drobo for about $1k ($500 for drives $500 for good chassis). Raid 1 I just an easy mirror, raid 5 takes a better controller you don't want to cheap out on.
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Ok great. Should Raid-1 be sufficient?
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You only get what you pay for, so research your requirements carefully first and what your peak loads will be.
If you want performance you will need a decent CPU, as many spindles as you can afford and at least two NIC ports if you intend to service lots of clients.
If you plan to use iscsi and want to share the storage make sure the unit supports shared storage the Drobo Pro doesn't but the Elite does!
If you intend to use it in a Virtual Environment make sure it has the VMware or Hyper-V HCL approval.
Be sure your chosen vendor has a level of support you are comfortable with.
Everyone of the major storage suppliers have offerings from £500 - £5000 to do the job but as always the budget is likely to determine your final selection.
Just don't sell yourself short! Determine your real needs and sell these to the SMT and Finance.
If you want performance you will need a decent CPU, as many spindles as you can afford and at least two NIC ports if you intend to service lots of clients.
If you plan to use iscsi and want to share the storage make sure the unit supports shared storage the Drobo Pro doesn't but the Elite does!
If you intend to use it in a Virtual Environment make sure it has the VMware or Hyper-V HCL approval.
Be sure your chosen vendor has a level of support you are comfortable with.
Everyone of the major storage suppliers have offerings from £500 - £5000 to do the job but as always the budget is likely to determine your final selection.
Just don't sell yourself short! Determine your real needs and sell these to the SMT and Finance.
The software-NAS players are:
http://www.openfiler.com/
http://www.freenas.org/
http://www.nexenta.com/corp/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=4&Itemid=67
look @ this to build freenas
http://howtoforge.com/network_attached_storage_with_freenas
or you could get synology nas based on linux OS
http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS410/index.php
http://www.openfiler.com/
http://www.freenas.org/
http://www.nexenta.com/corp/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=4&Itemid=67
look @ this to build freenas
http://howtoforge.com/network_attached_storage_with_freenas
or you could get synology nas based on linux OS
http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS410/index.php
A word of advice: if you're building a RAID system, *please* make sure that your drives are supported by the RAID controller manufacturer in RAID configurations. You can read the tales of woe here and in other fora when people use cheap non-RAID disks in RAID systems. It' gets "not pretty", pretty fast.
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