Storage solution for small business

FL630 · 13 May 2015 at 19:59

Hi,

Looking to update my Fathers companies IT systems over the coming months to bring more speed and reliability into his office.

I'm currently looking for a storage/backup type drive and am thinking a NAS might be the solution, though I'm clueless about them, so perhaps some pointers would be handy.

The use will be:
General storage, word/excel/pictures/backups of files of various shapes and sizes. Not using videos or anything strenuous. All "live" work will be from the drive.

Requirements:
Backed up, accessible from anywhere, usable by multiple users (5 or so but may expand).

Any thoughts on what to use?

Thanks!

bledd · 13 May 2015 at 21:54

Synology

ginjaninja · 14 May 2015 at 15:41

would be useful to know the total size and the rate of change per day...

For a small business of normal office document usage...some thoughts/assumptions

performance is not an issue - 100 users average <5MBps in total...Cheapest RAID storage will be a magnitude greater in performance.

data access & integrity usually is highest importance.
ideally all data including user data is redirected to a central service that has an archive strategy in line with RTO/RPO objectives.

A drive mapping to a NAS (assuming there is no server(s) in the mix) would be a simple entry level solution. Advantages of redirection under MS environments at least is that data is maintained local should users roam/ or nas go offline...so an extra tier of availability...

I presume cloud storage as primary storage is not an option as multi wan/pop for a 5 user business is not cost effective. For small datasizes with a flexible RTO cloud storage for ARCHIVE may be a good option (cheap, very accessible (as long as RTO is flexible - somewhere will have access to internet, cloud service providors have very good uptime).

Raid 1 has enough performance and is more transportable to different controllers, and cheaper only 2 disks required.

Primary storage could be a RAID 1 2-port NAS supporting your clients storage protocol/authentication (probably any).
Optionally port 2's disk could be rotated and the raid rebuilt every night and taken offsite.
Optionally you could script a backup into dropbox or something similar..

an even cheaper solution would be to put two drives (most mboards support raid 1) into a pc and have the others connect (and for go the nas)..although you would loose hot plug-ability...

DIABLO · 14 May 2015 at 18:36

If you want plug and play get a Synology NAS if you want something that is more future proof and flexible i would consider a HP Microserver for £120.

FL630 · 14 May 2015 at 19:45

Thanks for the replies so far.

Ginjaninja, thanks for the detail in yours, however most of it went right over my head. I'm not too good with networking and storage stuff if I'm honest. Cloud storage is out of the question, it's a little expensive and my Father is a bit old school, likes to keep things in his control!

His current setup is an aged D*ll server, which has just ended up being used as a file storage with a mapped drive. It's big, loud, clunky and coming to the end of its very long life.

I need something where he, and the other employees, can access said files by going My Computer > DriveLetter:\ and see everything. Literally that is all that is needed.

Obviously this would be hooked up to the router so it can be accessed from work, home, abroad etc.

Will a Synology NAS do this?

HP Microserver looks good, I really like what I've read so far. I assume it's £120, load it up with 4x HDD (perhaps in Raid 10?) and install and OS? Any other options apart from Windows due to cost?

Another nicety would be to be able to remove at least one of the disks in the evening to keep safe, all I'll say with that is once bitten twice shy!

Thanks

ginjaninja · 14 May 2015 at 21:59

Synology will do it... as will any nas...if all you are looking for is a drive mapping to a device which can have a disk removed (hot pluggable)....then a NAS like synology would be a better fit than a microserver which probably doesnt come with the sort of OS/Software as standard useful for storage solutions (NAS typically do)...

Synology is a premium brand....any nas supporting SMB 2 (assuming your clients are m$) would be good enough...no need to increase performance and risk of impact with raid 10 (at least 4 disks)...raid 1 with 2 disks will more than suffice..assuming the storage sizes are low ,1tb?

cloud storage for low utilisation can be free...bear that in mind...eg dropbox gives me 50GB foc.

hooking up for remote access...you could allow webdav (https) direct to the nas via port forwarding on the router (webdav is a typically support remote access protocol for file transfer)...but this will open you up to brute force attacks on your sensitive files with 1 line of defense and possibly no logging of such attacks...
a slightly better solution might be a router which supports l2tp vpn termination and logging...and then a separate authentication with logging to the NAS....
good to have logging of authentication success and failures at least somewhere to see if anything untoward is going on (and review of said logs)...separate accounts for each remote user even better.

if your not overly familiar with the terminology then a premium brand (ie a bit more expensive) NAS is more likely to be a bit more plug and play...a microserver is probably more involved as you have to source and install your own software? eg file shares? remote access? logging?

Dont know wether any nas' have built in clients for cloud services like drop box if you wanted an automated offsite backup (and your data sizes permitted it at a cost effective rate). Otherwise raid 1, 2 disks would be the easiest way to rotate a set of offsite disks...
again raid 10 would mean at least 2 disks required per offsite backup and more fiddly remembering which port is which...