Network Engineers/Techs - Need some advice/help

[Agreeable Slick]

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.

[Mr_F]

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

[Agreeable Slick]

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.

[Mr_F]

Affordable....What's your budget?

[Agreeable Slick]

Good question, I would imagine a few K would be available.

[Jay]

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

[Mr_F]

Also a good option Jay

 

[Jay]

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'.

[Mr_F]

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?

[madmanluke]

Take a look at Drobo stuff. Very good - possibly out of your price range?