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Building a home server. Please help, DC!
JavaJones:
Yeah, I'm not in the "your data needs are crazy" camp either. I've got, er... 20+TB at home. So yeah.
If you want "triple redundancy" and you *don't* need any of that to be off-site (or you're willing to do some schlepping on a regular basis to achieve off-site security), then I think your best bet is to get the largest NAS you can, buy 3 of them, use one locally to backup the other, then backup to a 3rd one on a weekly or monthly basis and keep it off-site the majority of the time.
NAS setups are simple, if you want future expansion capacity just get one with more drive bays. That Synology with 12 bays is pretty extreme, by the time you fill it up you might even want to just fully replace your NAS hardware anyway, but it's not completely unreasonable to get it. Personally I'd probably go for the DS1511+ with 5 bays and get 5x3TB drives = 15GB storage or ~11TB in RAID5. It's less than half the price of the DS2411+ as well which will help the pocket book if you want to buy 3.
Also, just because some people believe NAS is not acceptable for "enterprise use" doesn't mean A: everyone thinks that B: that "enterprise use" applies to you. Plenty of businesses (where do you draw the line between small business and "enterprise"?) use NAS products and there are business-oriented systems that have reasonable reliability, configurability, etc. The Synology units are among them.
Not to mention that with triple redundancy, well, no high-end enterprise solution is going to give you *more* reliability in a single box for less money than it would cost to achieve true triple redundancy on lower-end hardware. In other words you can have a high-end SAN system for tens of thousands of dollars that is super-reliable with redundancy and self-corrective systems, but unless you plan to buy 2 or 3 and keep one off-site, your house burning down can still kill it. With cheaper hardware, buy more of them and keep copies, with one off-site you're as protected as you're likely to get.
- Oshyan
f0dder:
Also, just because some people believe NAS is not acceptable for "enterprise use" doesn't mean A: everyone thinks that B: that "enterprise use" applies to you. Plenty of businesses (where do you draw the line between small business and "enterprise"?) use NAS products and there are business-oriented systems that have reasonable reliability, configurability, etc. The Synology units are among them.-JavaJones (September 01, 2011, 04:11 PM)
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...not to mention that some of the really heavy enterprise storage systems are actually NASes and not SANs :)
lotusrootstarch:
there is no commercial grade NAS
-lotusrootstarch (September 01, 2011, 07:28 AM)
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Hmm...
There's a huge market for something bigger than a file server that doesn't entail the complexity and expense of implementing a SAN solution. That's where NAS really shines. Several of my corporate clients already use NAS appliances. And several others plan on getting one.
So...perhaps somebody better inform NetApp, HP, Hitachi, and a host of other manufacturers, that there's no such thing as what they're selling? :P
-40hz (September 01, 2011, 03:56 PM)
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True. I'm not trying to deny the business merits of NAS appliances, I was just saying that there are a bunch of factors that prevent NAS from playing a serious role. :)
To list a few:
1. The NIC becomes a serious bottleneck with increased capacity. How long will it take to back up a 10TB NAS with a SMB transfer speed of ~35MB? Very cumbersome to move large chunks of data for purposes like archiving/making backups.
Think about it even in a home usage scenario, a normal BD burning session at 8x from a NAS can easily max out its link.
2. Lack of fine-grained access management even with AD integration.
Stoic Joker:
The schism/stepping off point is (or seems to be) cost. For the cost of 10TB of BestBuy class NAS boxes one could easily just get a refurbished commercial server that will always have parts available, is designed to take 100+ times the beating you'll ever give it, and it has a proper true hardware RAID controller ... With a year warranty ... For roughly the same price.
40hz:
The schism/stepping off point is (or seems to be) cost. For the cost of 10TB of BestBuy class NAS boxes one could easily just get a refurbished commercial server that will always have parts available, is designed to take 100+ times the beating you'll ever give it, and it has a proper true hardware RAID controller ... With a year warranty ... For roughly the same price.
-Stoic Joker (September 01, 2011, 06:00 PM)
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Amen. Exactly right! :Thmbsup:
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