In House NAS + Cloud

[Arkaign]

Anyone here run their own cloud attached NAS? By that, I mean not paying a third party for it, but rather hosting it yourself.

One of our clients has a 100/100 connection, and currently uses Egnyte.

Their experience with Egnyte is heavily mixed. When they started, it was a bit wobbly. It got better over time, but recently they have quadrupled their pricing and cut support. It's horrible.

They don't have a huge need for cloud based access, but it would be nice. Overall they would probably only need about 20 megabytes or so transferred online during a typical month, 99% of serious work is done off the NAS on site.

Anyhow, my goal is to build a solution that would use our current Netgear NAS, or alternatively a new dedicated file server with NAS functionality, that is also available via cloud sync.

I see a ton of options online, but would like something that someone here has used and can recommend that is :

(1)- Not extremely complicated to install and maintain.

and

(2)- Something that we buy the hardware and software up-front, and pay zero fees going forward beyond the existing ISP 100mbit up/down contract.

This will be about 300GB of data with the potential to grow towards 600-800GB over the next 3-5 years, and there are usually 15-25 users, with the potential to grow to 25-40 over the same timeframe.

 

[aigomorla]

Are they just gonna fetch files?

I was always lost on a difference between a cloud file server vs a full bloated ftp server.

Wouldn't it be easier to setup a ftp with accounts then a full cloud?

 

[Doomer]

What exactly differentiates a "Cloud" from other means of connecting to remote storage such as FTP, web publishing, etc?

 

[Arkaign]

Are they just gonna fetch files?

I was always lost on a difference between a cloud file server vs a full bloated ftp server.

Wouldn't it be easier to setup a ftp with accounts then a full cloud?

It would definitely be easier, but I would prefer a cloud sync to make things as transparent as possible to the users. WebDAV cloud mapped drive = basically no-brainer for the users, it just looks like a mapped drive, the folder structure in it's entirety and app behavior with those files/folders is exactly what they are used to.

Of course, if there is a way to make an FTP solution behave like that, I'm open ears 🙂

 

[Arkaign]

What exactly differentiates a "Cloud" from other means of connecting to remote storage such as FTP, web publishing, etc?

I dunno, buzzwords maybe?

For my purposes this is what happens :

There is the O: drive that people are mapped to on-site. This is physically a NAS device in the closet. It runs a proprietary Linux OS, and runs an egnyte app that syncs it continually to the cloud copy of this drive bidirectionally.

There is the Z: drive that people are mapped to off-site, also available through a web interface. It connects via WebDAV and looks identical to the O: drive when they're on site. If you modify a file here, or create one, it appears nearly instantly on the O: drive back at the office for other users should they be collaborating on a case.

That is what I need to maintain, but hopefully without Egnyte in the picture. They are stunningly terrible in how they treat their customers.

 

[alkemyst]

What exactly differentiates a "Cloud" from other means of connecting to remote storage such as FTP, web publishing, etc?

Cloud is a combination of many things. It also usually allows live usage of the files rather than a download/install or download/open model.

It almost like saying WWW = the Internet.

 

[Doomer]

Using "Web Publishing" on my NAS I can open, run, install, copy and do whatever else I could do if the file were local. As far as I know now, "Cloud" is nothing more than a marketing term.

 

[alkemyst]

Using "Web Publishing" on my NAS I can open, run, install, copy and do whatever else I could do if the file were local. As far as I know now, "Cloud" is nothing more than a marketing term.

NAS / SAN is the backbone of Cloud...it's not the same as people saying it's just FTP/HTTP/etc.

The caveat is it's non-localized and shared.

 

[beginner99]

I dunno, buzzwords maybe?

For my purposes this is what happens :

There is the O: drive that people are mapped to on-site. This is physically a NAS device in the closet. It runs a proprietary Linux OS, and runs an egnyte app that syncs it continually to the cloud copy of this drive bidirectionally.

There is the Z: drive that people are mapped to off-site, also available through a web interface. It connects via WebDAV and looks identical to the O: drive when they're on site. If you modify a file here, or create one, it appears nearly instantly on the O: drive back at the office for other users should they be collaborating on a case.

That is what I need to maintain, but hopefully without Egnyte in the picture. They are stunningly terrible in how they treat their customers.

The alternative would be a VPN and then you map directly to the NAS also from outside just like from inside. However I can't tell you how complex or expensive that is to manage.

 

[crash331]

I don't know if the solution you are using has an option like this, but I use a Synology NAS at home. It has a package I can install called Cloud Station. It has a client you install that syncs exactly like dropbox does.

 

[aigomorla]

Of course, if there is a way to make an FTP solution behave like that, I'm open ears 🙂

not without setting up vpn's.

i dont think u can map offsite drives unless ur set in a vpn tunnel?
or am i wrong?

As for cloud syncing... thats gonna be hard because most of the cloud services come with the VPN sync software they use on there servers. :\


Possibly get a VPN router and setup VPN's?
You can build a firewall router with VPN using pfsense or smoothwall.
Doesnt need to be its own machine... i know a lot of people who vm box this as well.

The alternative would be a VPN and then you map directly to the NAS also from outside just like from inside. However I can't tell you how complex or expensive that is to manage.

^ beat me to it..

yeah a VPN is the only way i can think of also to get what want...
Thats how i have mine setup to do what you want.. map a network drive off site.. however i need to log onto the VPN tunnel to do that.


I built a smoothwall VPN router just for that using a atomD2500 board with dual intel gigabit lan for arround $200 with 4gb of ram, case, 100gb 2.5HDD and a pico psu.
As i said u can virtualize this setup, if your server has the nic's.