Department NAS! Enter Storage Pro's ;]

[deezy]

Money has come available and we may finally be able to purchase some sort of NAS for our department (60 users). With our file server running low, I've been wanting to look into more storage for quite some time (maybe something a couple of terabytes big, not larger than 4TB at this time). Primarily whatever we get will hold some training videos, and class recordings. As well as user profiles for new users coming on to our thin client system...currently my documents are being redirected to another file server. I keep seeing these little NAS boxes ie. Drobo, Terastation, ReadyNAS...but not sure how much faith to put into one of them for our environment...or should I keep relying on a dedicated true RAID5 file server for these types of things.

What's your thoughts? Can these little NAS boxes replace the normal rack mounted NAS I would expect from Dell/HP?

Thx

[tokenuser]

A limitation on many of the new "small" NAS options is that they are suitable for single user or one or two user access, but are not great for enterprise wide deployments. You are definately going to be better off with a traditional rack mount RAID5 storage option in your environment, because if one disc fails in most of the small NAS environments, you are hosed. Also, adding additional storage to the enterprise NAS setups will just expand your available drive space, rather than needing a user to attach to mutliple NAS servers to access data they might be looking for.

[scienceking]

Traditional options are by far the best if you have the money, space, and time to maintain them.

Focus namely on getting a good RAID controller. Don't go cheap on it. Make sure it supports as many different operating systems as possible out of the box, even if you only plan to run one OS on it, so if worse came to worse you would have minimal problems recovering from it. I think it goes without saying that you should install your OS on a different volume from the RAID array. The one feature that separates the men from the boys on raid controllers is how much onboard RAM they have or if they will let you upgrade the onboard RAM. Another luxury feature is a battery backup for the raid controller. This way if your system crashes/loses power it will have enough power to maintain its onboard cache RAM and later write it to disk so you don't lose anything. This avoids a critical "flaw" with RAID with stripe corruption, so its worth seeking if you really need NASA grade reliability.