Help me build an NAS

king_of_inismac

Hi all,

We need to buy a NAS for our office as a backup.

The size is about 5-6 terrabytes.

I know almost nothing about NASs. Can anyone recommend an online seller or a good place to start?

Thanks,
M

coylemj

Your boss gives you the job of sorting out the system backup so you ask a bunch of anonymous people on an internet forum...

ronkmonster

king_of_inismac wrote: »

Hi all,

We need to buy a NAS for our office as a backup.

The size is about 5-6 terrabytes.

I know almost nothing about NASs. Can anyone recommend an online seller or a good place to start?

Thanks,
M

Build from scratch or buy a ready made box with just the drives to install?

king_of_inismac

You do realise you're posting on an anonymous internet forum yourself? Isn't that the point of boards?

No, our group just got funding so we're buying a backup. If you search my own posts, you'll see I spend half my posts answering other people's queries.

Thanks for your input though :rolleyes:

king_of_inismac

ronkmonster wrote: »

Build from scratch or buy a ready made box with just the drives to install?

Yea, I'm going to buy them separately. Can you recommend a good brand of NAS?

coylemj

king_of_inismac wrote: »

You do realise you're posting on an anonymous internet forum yourself? Isn't that the point of boards?

Yes but I'm not asking complete strangers for advice that could affect my job or my standing at work. If you want advice on what backup solution to implement at work I suggest you pay a professional for advice, at least that way you have an ass to kick if something goes wrong.

What backup s/w are you going to use - will you install backup agents on each client to send the data to a central server to be backed up or will each client backup it's own data direct to the NAS?

Are you making the mistake of selecting the h/w before designing a workable solution?

ScumLord

If it's in an office setting and you have a spare PC you could turn that into a NAS. I think that's what I'm going to do with my old PC.

Emer2012

coylemj wrote: »

Yes but I'm not asking complete strangers for advice that could affect my job or my standing at work. If you want advice on what backup solution to implement at work I suggest you pay a professional for advice, at least that way you have an ass to kick if something goes wrong.

What backup s/w are you going to use - will you install backup agents on each client to send the data to a central server to be backed up or will each client backup it's own data direct to the NAS?

Are you making the mistake of selecting the h/w before designing a workable solution?

Where did I say it would affect my job or my status at work? Where did I say my boss asked me to do it? If you don't want to be helpful, fine! Move along!

PogMoThoin

Take a look at this: http://www.hpshop.ie/products.asp?partno=658553-421

I have one of them as a home media server with 4 added drives. You have a choice of what OS to install.

zuroph

http://www.hpshop.ie/products.asp?partno=658553-421
buy two of these. Then post me one please.

king_of_inismac

Thanks guys. That's a good start anyway.

ED E

Do you understand RAID? If its for a work backup the data is likely quite important so redundancy is vital. RAID will give you this. Setting it up can be tricky in some setups so you should aim for a solution that has its own GUI manager so you can easily configure and maintain/extend it.

Another thing to consider before you buy is noise. If its going in your workspace find something quiet or you'll go nuts.

Kensington

king_of_inismac wrote: »

Hi all,

We need to buy a NAS for our office as a backup.

The size is about 5-6 terrabytes.

I know almost nothing about NASs. Can anyone recommend an online seller or a good place to start?

Thanks,
M

A backup for what though? Just to have a second copy of all data or is this intended to cover you for a major disaster?

What happens if the office is completely gutted by fire or flooding?
There's a power spike that fries all of the components in your computers?
Someone maliciously wipes all of your data on the network?
What sort of systems/data do you need to back up?
Do you need to cover yourself so that say, six months down the line you discover you urgently need a file recovered that you created today but it's been deleted off the source computer and isn't being kept on the NAS anymore? How long will you keep copies of the data on the NAS for?

How are you going to initiate the backups from each system? Is everyone expected to do it manually?
How are you going to monitor the backups? How do you know you are backing up what you think you are backing up?
How are you transferring the data over from each system to the NAS? 10Mb LAN? 100Mb LAN? 1Gb LAN? WiFi?

Not as a critique against you, but if you admit yourself you know nothing about a NAS then it's time to step well back and call in someone who does.

Trust me - when something goes tits up the first thing that happens is the finger pointing game and if you get yourself associated as the one who put the backup "solution" in place then if it doesn't work the way management expect it to then it's your rep, job and career on the line. A good backup solution isn't simply keeping a second copy of your data on another machine, it's much, much more involved than that.

Gone Drinking

Wow, talking about getting a hard time. Lads, could be a small business. Hasn't anyone here ever learned anything on the fly? Setting up NAS isn't rocket science for a small business (take it from me, I support enterprise SAN/NAS).

If you're a small business, look up the Buffalo TeraStation.

I would deffiently suggest buying two of them though, so you can setup replication, which will give you redundancy. Drives will fail, raid won't always save you.

Raid 6 and backup of your backups!

ED E

Depending on the value of the data, a RAID 1 setup may be enough redundancy. It all depends on how important it is.

unnameduser

If it's backup you are looking for then you need to be looking at an offsite/online solution for the reasons outlined by Kensington above

Gone Drinking

ED E wrote: »

Depending on the value of the data, a RAID 1 setup may be enough redundancy. It all depends on how important it is.

It's a backup.. its going to be important. What's the advantage of raid 1 in a backup? Backups need to be kept safe. Raid 6 is the best way to do that.

Gone Drinking

unnameduser wrote: »

If it's backup you are looking for then you need to be looking at an offsite/online solution for the reasons outlined by Kensington above

This can be done with the Terastation I mentioned. You can create an off site replication of the data if you have a VPN setup.

Kensington

Gone Drinking wrote: »

Wow, talking about getting a hard time. Lads, could be a small business. Hasn't anyone here ever learned anything on the fly? Setting up NAS isn't rocket science for a small business (take it from me, I support enterprise SAN/NAS).

If you're a small business, look up the Buffalo TeraStation.

I would deffiently suggest buying two of them though, so you can setup replication, which will give you redundancy. Drives will fail, raid won't always save you.

Raid 6 and backup of your backups!

I'm not trying to give anyone a hard time myself - we all have to learn somewhere and from someone after all . But going out and buying a NAS with a load of storage space and thinking that's you done backup-wise is a very, very dangerous line of thinking.

Buying the hardware is the easy bit, deciding what needs to go where, how it should function in terms of your whole backup solution and how you manage the actual backup process is the difficult bit and could well decide whether your business lives or dies when something goes seriously wrong. If it does go wrong, presumably the OP is the one they're going to turn to so for the OP's sake, you need to get it right.

Ideally, your primary backups is a NAS with striped parity RAID which stores or backs up all your critical files centrally, rather than each user storing them solely on their desktop or laptop (or a USB key). This covers you for accidental deletion of locally stored files or theft of a laptop, loss of a USB key etc. RAID, however, is NOT in itself a backup solution.

You should have offsite replication as secondary backup - for a small business a cloud solution is probably workable, depending on how much data you need to replicate and how quickly you would need access to it if your local copy is lost. This covers you if your building burns down and takes out the NAS with it.

Then you should have deep storage such as LTO for archiving and point-in-time backups so that in a year's time, two years time, five years time, you'll have a copy of all your data as it was on day X.

Hogan1

Look up qnap nas boxes

king_of_inismac

Hi all,

We're a small research group. Most of the data isn't code so for this application I'm not too concerned about version control.

Almost all of us backup offsite ourselves. This NAS is basically just an extra onsite backup and a way to share files across various different users.

So for now, hardware is my only real concern.

Thanks for the help so far!