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Right then,
I'm after a server for a friend who runs his own event photography business. At the moment he stores all the photographs from an event on a NAS drive. Since moving to the Nikon D2X camera, each image is now nearly 7Mb and when the public are trying to browse the images on 3 laptops to choose the pictures they want to order.... the NAS drive just isn't keeping up, causing Explorer to hang, customer gets frustrated and (worst case scenario) - leaves the marquee.
I've suggested we consider having a dedicated fileserver, rather than rely on a Small/Home Office NAS device- which currently has no redundancy and no means (I don't think) of upgrading/replacing the hard disk inside. The lack of redundancy poses a significant risk to the business, which he is keen to mitigate.
It's important that whatever I/we end up putting in can keep up without causing the 'Windows Picture & Fax Viewer' to hang for more than a second or two.
So at the moment this would be just for quotation purposes- no decisions have been made although he is keen to realise the benefits of a dedicated server (redundancy, scalability, availability).
So now you know the business requirements, here's the requirements from a technical perspective:
- The server will be used solely for peer-to-peer file serving (no mail, web, DC etc).
- Needs to be able to dish out ~7Mb files to 3 laptops concurrently
- Preferably NOT rack-mountable for portability
- Must have Gigabit LAN, to fit in with phase 2- upgrade the network to gigabit
- Must have 2 HDDs (or, if only 1- the ability to add another), preferably 10,000 RPM SCSI RAID for maximum performance & redundancy- hot-swap not required
- At least 1Gb RAM
Your suggestions please
I'm after a server for a friend who runs his own event photography business. At the moment he stores all the photographs from an event on a NAS drive. Since moving to the Nikon D2X camera, each image is now nearly 7Mb and when the public are trying to browse the images on 3 laptops to choose the pictures they want to order.... the NAS drive just isn't keeping up, causing Explorer to hang, customer gets frustrated and (worst case scenario) - leaves the marquee.
I've suggested we consider having a dedicated fileserver, rather than rely on a Small/Home Office NAS device- which currently has no redundancy and no means (I don't think) of upgrading/replacing the hard disk inside. The lack of redundancy poses a significant risk to the business, which he is keen to mitigate.
It's important that whatever I/we end up putting in can keep up without causing the 'Windows Picture & Fax Viewer' to hang for more than a second or two.
So at the moment this would be just for quotation purposes- no decisions have been made although he is keen to realise the benefits of a dedicated server (redundancy, scalability, availability).
So now you know the business requirements, here's the requirements from a technical perspective:
- The server will be used solely for peer-to-peer file serving (no mail, web, DC etc).
- Needs to be able to dish out ~7Mb files to 3 laptops concurrently
- Preferably NOT rack-mountable for portability
- Must have Gigabit LAN, to fit in with phase 2- upgrade the network to gigabit
- Must have 2 HDDs (or, if only 1- the ability to add another), preferably 10,000 RPM SCSI RAID for maximum performance & redundancy- hot-swap not required
- At least 1Gb RAM
Your suggestions please