Buying advice for small to medium size company

[nelsonbd]

Hi,

I need to upgrade from an aging red hat samba v2.2 server used by about 20-25 desktops, currently using a P4 3ghz, 1GB RAM, 3ware raid card & 4 disks in raid 10 = 640GB of storage, gigabit ethernet

I currently looking at either building my own NAS using openfiler/freenas (are they a good choice?) or buying an off the shelf NAS like the QNAP, 509/639 or maybe has high as the Qnap 8090..

Has anyone experience with something in this range/size as I need to keep it to as smaller budget as possible but looking for 5 years service out of it..

I am also thinking of going down the Vmware route & thus looking at attaching the NAS via ISCSI..

Thanks for any input!

Barry

 

[thiggins]

If you have a business to run, I wouldn't futz with building your own NAS.

Best combination of support,features and performance is probably the NETGEAR ReadyNAS Pro, or perhaps the new NVX if you can live with lower performance and only four drives.

The QNAPs are also good choices. There are many discussions about the TS 509 Pro in the forums.

 

[nelsonbd]

So would you say generally that the above class "off the shelf" NAS devices are good enough for a general office of 25 people hitting a decent dell server running vmware ESXi that is utilising the NAS as a datastore for a file server, email server & MS SQL server?

I was just a little concerned if they were up to the task as the NAS devices you reviewed seemed to be using motherboard raid & not using a dedicated raid card with offload engine etc..

Cheers

Barry

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

So would you say generally that the above class "off the shelf" NAS devices are good enough for a general office of 25 people hitting a decent dell server running vmware ESXi that is utilising the NAS as a datastore for a file server, email server & MS SQL server?

I'd be wanting enterprise grade 15krpm drives on separate volumes pulling those jobs. At the very least 10krpm drives..SAS.

 

[thiggins]

That is the market that NETGEAR, QNAP, Thecus, Synology, etc. are after. But YeOlde is right that if you are really whacking away at the drives with applications that are doing a lot of random reads/writes, you may not want SATA drives.

What drives are you using in your current server?

Why a NAS anyway vs. attached storage?

 

[nelsonbd]

Currently I have a samba file server (5 years old) using 4 x 320gb sata disks in RAID 10 & a separate DB server runing windows XP & SQL server 2005 express using 4 x 10K 75GB sata raptors in raid 10 both using 8506-4 3ware raid cards (both servers the same spec other than that). They are coping ok but I need to introduce updated samba server software & full MS SQL server for a new CRM system - so it would be a good time to upgrade & virtualise the hardware for the next 5 years.

So by todays standards they are not high spec by any means.. So thats why I am not sure if I should use an off the shelf raid system (obviously they have improved a lot over the years & simple to maintain) or do I need to go for something a bit more meaty?? I am on a tight budget, so if I do need something more meaty thats why i was considering a custom job (something along the lines of a 6-8 disks, 9500 3ware card doing RAID 6 using openfiler maybe..)

Any thoughts are welcome as I am new to NAS technology..

Regards attached storage, I will end up populating the NAS with a decent amount of storage - more than enough for future expansion but also it would allow me to use it with any other projects/servers that come along over the years - that I may not be able to virtualise on that server... So flexibilty really I suppose...

A step up from a top of the range QNAP/Netgear NAS seems to be something like a DELL PowerVault NF500 but that costs £4000 when fully specified with with Iscsi & 6x750GB sata disks!!

Cheers

Barry

 

[thiggins]

I'm losing track of the current and proposed configurations and who/what is using the proposed NAS.

If the proposed NAS is just serving as data store for a file server, then I would go with an eSATA or Firewire 800 connected DAS for best price performance.

I personally can't speak to how NASes hold up under multi-user loads. But remember that most have 256 MB or so of memory, so would run out of cache pretty quickly.