Storage solution for small company? (opinions)

[sswany]

Right now the company has a small server that runs NT4 but it's a piece of garbage. All we need is something to house a hard drive so that everyone can pull files from a shared folder. The workstations (about 7 of them, all on a basic switch so that they can see the server) all do their own thing, they just need the common files. This computer just has issues and they can never get it to back up correctly. I've seen these external hard drives with CAT5 connectoins on them and think that that might be a vialbe alternative, but I wonder about backing up. I was thinking about something that a RAID setup that would just mirror itself across two HDs in case of failure. That way it would cut the excess server capabilities and just stick to the storage needed.

Does anyone have any other ideas on what might be a good idea for something simple like this? Thanks for the help.

 

[MulLa]

Don't forget you'll still need an off site backup such as tape. What if (touch wood) the office gets burnt down? Or someone came in and decide to take your NAS with them?

Other than that your idea of a NAS is sound. I would recommend that too.

 

[sswany]

What kind of inexpensive NAS solutions that have RAID are there?

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

You might look into something like a SnapServer, they come with a single disk or RAID. Personally, I'd have a daily backup and a simple single disk server for your situation, why fool around with RAID? I like USB 2.0 disks for off-site backup, and the backup is universally accessable to almost any machine on the planet.

 

[MysticLlama]

I'm going to be migrating it out in a few months (too much growth, moving to something a lot bigger), but I have a MaxAttach 4100S that has served us pretty well.

It has 4x80GB HDDs, 200GB useable in a RAID5, mirrored OS and backup OS. It's pretty slow (Celeron 533/384mb) so you can't expect it to really push much out of the 1000mb NIC.

It runs a full version of Win2k Server + the Server Appliance Kit (SAK). I even used it as a clutch DC when I had a server fail.

All in all, it worked pretty good for the gap it filled at the time, and I only paid like $1200 for it about two years ago. Maybe you could find something similar on eBay?

The other thing to look at would be a cheap Compaq Proliant server with two SCSI drives and RAID1, those can be had for under $1000. You'd have a lot less storage capacity than the NAS, but it'd be faster and could do more "server" stuff, but it all depends on how much storage you really need.

 

[sswany]

Has anyone seen or heard anything about a company reByte? The technology looks kind of the same as a Snap Server (which also looks like something very promising), but you convert an old machine into one. We have all the hardware. I just don't know if anyone has used them.

I was just looking and the 80GB Linksys EFG80 NAS looks viable also. Anyone have any experience with them?

 

[MysticLlama]

Is that the thing where you boot the machine off of a CF card with an OS image off of it, and then have another drive set up for storage?

A guy I know got a little thing like that and it works pretty good from what he was saying, basically plug and play.

 

[BoKingWen]

Try new Buffalo Linkstation I just pick one up from Dell this week. It cost $310 and there is a $50 rebate. The Linktation comes with a 120 HD, 2 USB 2.0 port (lets you connect one external HD and one printer). The build in HD act as a network storage, if you run out of space you can connect another HD via the USB port (although there is 2 USB ports you can only connect one printer and one HD not 2 printers or 2 HDs). The Linkstation is small the height is about the same as my linksys rounter and it does look good. Setup is very simple just plug it in your network and I get it to work in less than 3 minutes. I highly recommand it if you want an easy solution for your office.

 

[cmetz]

Buy a Dell PE400SC on the latest Hot Deal (see that forum), stripped - $300ish net. Add 2x256MB PC3200 ECC RAM on the Kingston deal (see Hot Deals / FW), $86. Add two IDE hard drives of your liking; 120GB drives are going for like $60ish on deals. Install Linux on it and use software RAID-1 mirroring and serve SMB/CIFS with Samba (this is all fairly easy nowadays, since the GUI installer/config programs cover these features). For ca. $500 you can get a nice RAID-1 server that could also do plenty of other server tasks.

The main flaw I see with these new NAS products is that they're very rarely RAID of any flavor, and IDE hard drives made today just don't last. That's a recipe for disaster.

You should also do backups, that's a tricky problem in the SME cost scale. The solution I've been recommending to folks to burn known important stuff to CD and/or DVD (Lite-On DVD writers go for about $70 on a deal) and to use removable/external IDE hard drives stored off site as a backup medium. Tape is a better choice for this problem technologically, but the low-end tapes suck and the nicer tapes present a high cost barrier to entry.

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

While IDE hard disks are not exactly the most reliable component on the planet, the average hard disk will last several years of continuous use. Why screw around with RAID for a small office if you have good backups? In addition, without proper configuration and maintenance, many RAID equipped servers are less reliable than a plain IDE drive in a box.

 

[cmetz]

gunrunnerjohn, the average lifetime of an IDE hard drive in my environment is about a year. That's across all manufacturers, too. At customers' sites they sometimes last longer, but the mean lifetime is not as high as two years in my experience. The reason to "screw around with RAID for a small office if you have good backups" is that a small office might not have IT people who can respond immediately. If it takes a day of downtime for an IT person to get the system restored, how much is that lost productivity worth? Chances are, less than the cost of a second IDE hard drive.

If you set a computer up wrong, it doesn't work right. That's true for RAID as for anything else.

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

I'm not sure what you're doing to the hard disks in your office, because I get a lot more than a year out of most IDE drives, and that's in systems that run 24/7... However, everyone's entitled to their opinion here, I just don't happen to think that RAID is worth the extra bother for a small office as a rule.

 

[Abzstrak]

RAID is ALWAYS worth the bother... what $100 to $200?? also, USB drives for backups are stupid too, what about historical backups? you need a tape drive too, and about 20 tapes or so (assuming one tape will hold all info)

and there is nothing wrong with an NT4 server for sharing files, just fix it and make it stable... maybe reload it and RAID the drives.

 

[sswany]

I really do like the idea of RAID, as no one is usually available immediately to repair anything and the comfort of knowing that it would continue to work if one HD went south is nice. I really like the Snap Server, and the 1100's price of like $500 is very nice, but the 2200's $1500 price tag seems a bit much for just the addition of RAID (although I guess the size increase warrants the cost). I need to find a low cost RAID option I think.

 

[wlee]

If you really need to do this "on the cheap", you could get one or more IOMEGA NAS 400M boxes. These are factory refurb'd, but support RAID5 Hot Plug. Worth $750. For about $200 more you can get a factory new box. Diff model though and only 2 drives, no hot plug.

 

[sswany]

Is the only difference between the 400m and the 300u the size? They both support RAID and the 300u is still big enough and it's cheaper.

 

[wlee]

Besides the 300U being "sold out" ? The 300U runs BSD Kernal. It uses SAMBA to allow Windows Shares. The 400M runs Windows 2000 Server ( NAS Ver ). It supports running in an Active Directory Domain. ( if at some point you upgrade to that structure ) It also has hot plug drives where as the 300U has fixed drives. I think this class of box would make a good starting point, and you can add more as needed for reasonable cost. If that old NT4 server is good enough hardware, ( and *IF* and *WHEN* your budget allows ) you might also consider upgrading it to Win2003 Small Business Server. These NAS boxes *should* work well in that environment.

 

[sswany]

How hard would the 400 be to set up to connect to from a remote source. Maybe FTP? I was looking at the information on it online and didn't see anything like that. The Snap Server has it set up pretty easily, but I like the price of the IOMEGA, but the features of the Snap 2200 (I really like the 1100 as well, but without the RAID support, I'm not sure).

Thanks for the help.

 

[kevnich2]

I have the Iomega 400U, it fully support ftp and is very easy to setup and maintain. I previously had a SnapServer 2000. I traded it off for the Iomega 400U because my snapserver had an ATA33 IDE controller, thus limiting my file transfers to 1mB/sec I've had my 400U for about 2 months and have not had any problems with it. It is very easy to setup users, shares for individuals users as well as to FTP into from remote locations. The web based GUI is not as user friendly as the SnapServer is, but for the added hard drives (my unit has 4 hot swappable hard drives) and speed, It's very worth it.

 

[kevnich2]

Duplicate post

 

[Abzstrak]

Originally posted by: kevnich2
I have the Iomega 400U, it fully support ftp and is very easy to setup and maintain. I previously had a SnapServer 2000. I traded it off for the Iomega 400U because my snapserver had an ATA33 IDE controller, thus limiting my file transfers to 1mB/sec I've had my 400U for about 2 months and have not had any problems with it. It is very easy to setup users, shares for individuals users as well as to FTP into from remote locations. The web based GUI is not as user friendly as the SnapServer is, but for the added hard drives (my unit has 4 hot swappable hard drives) and speed, It's very worth it.

I don't understand, in ATA33 the 33 stands for 33MB/s, how does that limit you to 1MB/s?

 

[kevnich2]

If it's 33mbits per second, that translates into about 4mBytes per second maximum, on my network the maximum it would realistically transfer was 2-3mbytes, but most of the time for smaller files about 1mbyte. With my 400U, my average is around 8-9mBytes, and with how much transferring I do, that difference means alot with wasted time.

 

[Abzstrak]

Originally posted by: kevnich2
If it's 33mbits per second, that translates into about 4mBytes per second maximum, on my network the maximum it would realistically transfer was 2-3mbytes, but most of the time for smaller files about 1mbyte. With my 400U, my average is around 8-9mBytes, and with how much transferring I do, that difference means alot with wasted time.

no, this is incorrect. That is the burst speed, the physical capabilities of the drive are always slower, but it depends on the drive, not the speed of the interface. The reason your seeing a speed increase are because the drives themselves are faster, not the interface speed. Rotational rate, cluster density, caching, etc.... all play a big part in performance of the drive, still I don't know of any individual drives that can maintain 33MB/s+ It is useful for multiple drives per chain sometimes, but that depends on the application.

also, Mbytes, mbytes, and mbits are all totally different things...

 

[tubapaul]

I just purchased a reByte ($150) and put it in an old PC (P3 233 MHz, 96MB Ram--reByte recommends 128 MB though). Bought two UDMA/133 250GB drives from Office Depot ($160 each) as well, and just finished setting it all up.

reByte is an IDE-based CF card with a Linux dist. on it and a very simple setup utility that lets you set up a raid 1 or raid 5 file server (looks like it runs Samba) with up to 4 hard drives.

If you set up a shared directory on your PC, you can set reByte to automatically back up that directory on a scheduled basis, and there are also shared directories on the reByte server that you can FTP to from your computers on the lan, or even over the internet if you choose.

When I have it running my client's network I will post again with my observations re: performance, etc.

Paul

 

[SaigonK]

Originally posted by: sswany
Right now the company has a small server that runs NT4 but it's a piece of garbage. All we need is something to house a hard drive so that everyone can pull files from a shared folder. The workstations (about 7 of them, all on a basic switch so that they can see the server) all do their own thing, they just need the common files. This computer just has issues and they can never get it to back up correctly. I've seen these external hard drives with CAT5 connectoins on them and think that that might be a vialbe alternative, but I wonder about backing up. I was thinking about something that a RAID setup that would just mirror itself across two HDs in case of failure. That way it would cut the excess server capabilities and just stick to the storage needed.

Does anyone have any other ideas on what might be a good idea for something simple like this? Thanks for the help.

So call me crazy...but why dont you go out and buy a new server? Possibly a Dell Poweredge 1750 with three drives. Make it RAID-5 and you could have over 250GB of space available for the users and a ton of speed?

I know it would cost allot to start with, but it would get you up to Windows 2k and easier to manage...