Nas over two sites

FloppyPoppy

FloppyPoppy

FloppyPoppy

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Hey guys would it be possible to make a NAS be accessible from two different places.

I ask as i am not overly knowledgeable when it comes to servers/nas

We have two sites one for production and one for engineering

We do currently have a server provider ( the server system is local with us but is there kit ) but they are far to expensive for what they provide. over £1000 a month and they are yet to install a legit piece of software and we have hundreds of issues with the servers daily and they take like 3-4 days to return mail/calls

What they provide : 256GB per section there are 5 sections for various things.

These are also not backed up. They claim to be backing them up but any time we have had files go missing with server crashing they have not been able to recover the" backed up files "

They do also internal phones we just got rid of BT for this and what a mistake it was of our boss to cancel BT and go with our server providers as now the phones drop out and play up as well.

with this said i mentioned to my boss that i will look into setting one up as i imagine it should be possible

roughly 14 pcs need to be connected

Lets call it 7/7 per site

Would it be possible to have a NAS/Server at site A and all the systems there and at site B can access it.

I would like to RAID1 this for backups or would you recommend even a higher redundancy setup.

This way we would also have much more control over the system ect. As i am sure you can imagine we would like to part ways with these people ASAP

I would just like a little feedback about what exactly would be needed to set this up as i am not knowledgeable in the server side of things - i don't have issues building pc's setting up software or that nature of things it is mainly the getting the server wired up and getting the other pcs to connect to it over the networks

any help will be greatly apprecaited

Thanks

Harry

EDIT : Money should not be a major issue however i think between £1-£3 thousand seems reasonable. I could be now preparing to get laughed at hysterical by server pros for under estimation
 
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I'm finding it really hard to follow your posting style. The way I see it you have a couple of options - storage on each site with a sync between them with the inevitable delay that this involves (e.g. editing a file on site A will not show as edited on site B until the sync job next runs), or you designate one site as the main location and everyone on the other site accesses it over a VPN. If you go down this path you will need some sort of WAN acceleration because SMB is a very chatty protocol and will fall apart at the sort of latencies that exist outside of the LAN.

I'd be amazed if you could do this for your budget unless you roll your own FreeNAS or something similar.
 
What is the network link between the 2 sites? Is the LAN at each site good?

RAID is not a backup, it's just hardware redundancy. RAID is good, but it's useless when a user deletes an essential folder.

It sounds like you want to rip out the server and replace it with a NAS. Consider what other services the server provides - do you have a domain or is everything just running as a workgroup?

I think you need to get some assistance in from your incumbent or another IT provider, get your requirements down and ask them what they recommend. Banging a cheap NAS in as as attempt to fix a problematic server is not necessarily going to solve your problems. If your network's not right, you can buy the best enterprise kit money can buy and it'll still run like a dog.
 
I agree with Blue,

You need to look at what is currently linking the Sites.
Dependant on the Nas, You can have Site to Site replication which allows backup between the Nas' I have had this setup at a clients site where they had a similar setup and situation to yourselfs, we have it this way.
1 Nas @ each site.
1 Nas @ Directors home - Replication between all 3 over WAN.

It does look like you need to get someone else in to assess your requirements, Look at what your network is also like.
 
So, you've five departments in your organisation, sharing about 1.5TB of space on a server, across 2 sites?

If you're thinking of rolling your own solution:
Setup a prototype with two HP microservers, FreeNAS or NAS4Free, and RSync between them.
A third one for offsite backup? (Rsync once an night to it? Or some other backup method?)

Total cost probably less than one months spend, aside from the admin time in setup and learning.

How much downtime can you reasonably put up with?
Do you need better resilience in the hardware?
Then spec your production servers appropriately with UPS, Hardware RAID, dual power supplies
However theres cost and tradeoff - no point in having 2 power supplies and having them plugged into the same power for instance. Enterprise drives cost way more than consumer drives. Whats the warranty and repair going to be like.

Bear in mind your NAS / Server will have to integrate into your existing infrastructure, and be able to authenticate - presumably a Windows AD somewhere.

For twelve grand a year I'd expect someone to be answering your calls a bit quicker than 3-4 day turnaround!

I suppose the question really is - what are you expecting for your grand a month, what are they expecting to provide for that grand a month, and who is managing the relationship / contract?

EDIT: I misread the OP. You have just 14 users, 7 per site?
How do you have hundreds of issues per day with that small user base?
 
From what you have described, you are paying stupidly over the top.

For one years spend you could put in a proper infrastructure with proper name brand servers. Then as I'm assuming you have no outside IT pay someone to support it for 1/10 of the cost.
 
I don't think the monthly costs are too outrageous - I'm not aware of the specifics but £1000 a month flat rate for support isn't bad at all - that's a day and a half of a bog standard consultant. It doesn't sound like your guys are particularly good, but a grand a month isn't anywhere near the huge sum that some people think it is.

I think expecting to put everything in place for £12k is a bit wishful personally, assuming you'd have to buy at least one UPS per site, server hardware, licensing etc.
 
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