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General => General discussion => Topic started by: Agreeable Slick on 21 June 2011, 15:01

Title: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: Agreeable Slick on 21 June 2011, 15:01
Afternoon All,

Right, I am in need of some help.

I require some solutions in terms of midsized storage (1-10TB - possibly increasing over time), however, this needs to be accessable from two different locations, and by multiple people at any one time. So I am guessing an ethernet or cloud solution perhaps?

It must be secure, quick, stable, not overly expensive, easily accessible.

The files that are going to be stored on there are only small (hundreds of KB couple of MB max) but there will be a large volume of them on there (hence the space requirement of 1-10TB)

I've looked at IBM and Dell sites, but I get a bit bamboozled when they start talking about storage virtualisation or storage switch...

Your help is appreciated.
Title: Re: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: Mr_F on 21 June 2011, 15:11
Synology 211j

Depends if you want mirror'd storage to protect against drive failures, but you can do either with this unit.

Smack 2x3tb drives in the beast, follow the setup and it sits in your home.  Absoloutle breeze to set up and host to the public world, whichever features you want.  If you have BT Home hub its easy to show to the WW too.

http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS211j/index.php
Title: Re: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: Agreeable Slick on 21 June 2011, 15:17
Ok,

A few more points, this is going to be a business set up, so back up would have to be a definite requirement. It would be located at one of the two sites, currently only accessible by VPN as far as i'm aware, (but that shouldn't be a problem I don't think) and is going to act like a vault, allowing us to keep files safely for each site to have access to.
Title: Re: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: Mr_F on 21 June 2011, 15:27
Affordable....What's your budget?
Title: Re: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: Agreeable Slick on 21 June 2011, 15:47
Good question, I would imagine a few K would be available.
Title: Re: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: Jay on 21 June 2011, 20:11
Depends if you want to own the device and maintain it yourselves or rely on another company for hosting (cloud) as you want it accessible from 2 sites.

If you want to own the device there are a number of options, if you want to go ahead with this I can get some numbers for you, PM me. As it's going to be accessed from 2 sites you've got to consider bandwidth costs and if any/both of the sites are on DSL. If they've got a dedicated high speed WAN link great. If not, it'll pig arse slow to access files. We have customers who do this and their staff get frustrated but the management don't want to pay for quicker lines.

If you want a cloud based solution Amazon/JungleDisk sounds like a good option as you can increase storage as and when you require it, again bandwidth on the initial upload will be tremendous if it's starting at 1TB. It has it's draw backs, too which I'm sure you're probably aware of.

https://www.jungledisk.com/
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore
Title: Re: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: Mr_F on 22 June 2011, 10:28
Also a good option Jay

 :cool:
Title: Re: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: Jay on 22 June 2011, 13:22
Done a bit of digging and it'll cost a roughly £1k~ for a year's cloud based solution for 1TB on Amazon, never mind the bandwidth costs if you exceed the ISP's limits (if any?) or need to increase the storage capacity. After 2yrs or so that would have paid for a much larger capacity NAS. Would you also be looking no back it up? it's a bad idea to rely on the raid as the only form of 'backup'.
Title: Re: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: Mr_F on 22 June 2011, 14:17
You have the facility to backup the contents on one NAS to another storage location, if you have two sites, maybe store a NAs in each, could be quite cost effective especially if ran overnight, what sort of broardband contract are you on, unlimited?
Title: Re: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: madmanluke on 22 June 2011, 14:20
Take a look at Drobo stuff. Very good - possibly out of your price range?
Title: Re: Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help
Post by: Agreeable Slick on 22 June 2011, 21:06
Cheers for this chaps.

Aye, I think for what we need them for, cloud based solutions are a bit pony, and expensive.

We do have two sites, so looking at two NAS drives (or similar) and will back one up to the other. Our limiting factor at the moment is the connection to both sites, I tried today to work off my folder based on the network at the site I'm normally at and it's dire. Although, they are looking at upgrading in the next 3 weeks I believe.

I am going to a meeting next week over this, so will be looking at all the options listed to come up with something cost effective and functional.

Jay, I'll drop you a mail towards end of week, when I have a better idea of what would benefit us most.