Is NAS the way to go for me?

[MulLa]

Hi all,

Our "Jack of all trades" server is beginning to run out of space.

It's an AD, DNS, DHCP, Application (Accounting App), File, Print server, for an office of 30. It's running on a SCSI RAID-5. So I'm not too thrilled about getting bigger drives it's going to cost a fortune.

Was wondering if I should just grab a NAS to move some of the backup files that people have over to the NAS. Mainly people's Profiles / My Document / Shared Documents being stored on the server, think I can recover around 30GBs on the server if I do that.

One other problem would be backup. We currently only have one tape backup on the server and am not sure if I can use that same device to backup the NAS.

Are there any other alternatives? What's the advantage of the NAS over me acquiring cheap PC with say a 200GB HDD for that purpose?


Thanks in advance

 

[MysticLlama]

The main benefit of NAS is how they are built.

If you have one 200GB drive, then it fails, you're toast. The one I have has 4x80GB, and 200GB usable in RAID5 for actual storage.

It works fairly well, has the Windows 2000 SAK on it, though I REALLY wish it was 2003. It's not very fast, but fine for file serving.

On the one I have (MaxAttach 4100) it has a SCSI port to hook a tape directly up to it. You can configure your backup software on the main server to backup to the disk on the NAS, then have the NAS write the backup data off to tape. It creates a few issues with ASR, but for the most part it works great.

 

[mboy]

Originally posted by: MulLa
Hi all,

Our "Jack of all trades" server is beginning to run out of space.

It's an AD, DNS, DHCP, Application (Accounting App), File, Print server, for an office of 30. It's running on a SCSI RAID-5. So I'm not too thrilled about getting bigger drives it's going to cost a fortune.

Was wondering if I should just grab a NAS to move some of the backup files that people have over to the NAS. Mainly people's Profiles / My Document / Shared Documents being stored on the server, think I can recover around 30GBs on the server if I do that.

One other problem would be backup. We currently only have one tape backup on the server and am not sure if I can use that same device to backup the NAS.

Are there any other alternatives? What's the advantage of the NAS over me acquiring cheap PC with say a 200GB HDD for that purpose?


Thanks in advance

Man, u guys are going to be hurtin when that server takes a crap one day.

 

[MulLa]

MysticLlama: I think I'm going down the NAS path now. Probably be getting a simple Snap! 2200 series as it offers RAID 1. Mainly going to store old archive / backup files that people don't access very often. So it won't matter if performance isn't the best.

mboy: Well I know that. Considering that we're only small 30 staff, it doesn't make much economic sense to have multiple servers running, cost would be a major factor here. Tho we are going to put in additional servers later this year to lighten the load put on this one.

 

[cmetz]

MulLa, if you don't mind learning something, a PC with Fedora Core 1 Linux (distribution choice because it's really Red Hat and thus easy to get books on) running Samba with some IDE disks in a RAID configuration (Linux has a decent software RAID-0/1/5 btw) is a cheap way to handle file sharing. Samba works pretty well.

Backup integration depends on how you're doing it / what software you're using. A lot of "enterprise" backup solutions will do Linux and other *IX fine.

If you're more sensitive about sticking to what you know, you can spend some $$ and get a SnapServer or the Maxtor small NAS or something like that. Many of them actually run Linux and Samba inside... they just hide it behind a pretty UI so you don't have to deal with it.

 

[Relayer]

I have one of these Tritton NAS at work. link
It works fine and was cheap.

 

[mboy]

Originally posted by: MulLa
MysticLlama: I think I'm going down the NAS path now. Probably be getting a simple Snap! 2200 series as it offers RAID 1. Mainly going to store old archive / backup files that people don't access very often. So it won't matter if performance isn't the best.

mboy: Well I know that. Considering that we're only small 30 staff, it doesn't make much economic sense to have multiple servers running, cost would be a major factor here. Tho we are going to put in additional servers later this year to lighten the load put on this one.

How much will it cost when that server goes down and the staff of 30 can do no work?