Got one for all of you other techy people..

The amount of data that our company stores is about to rapidly increase due to us becoming a paperless office. We currently have 1 windows server that hosts our business apps, sage, filemaker server etc. We also have a power mac G5 running OSX server that hosts our files, email, intranet etc.

The windows server backs up critical data to the mac, and the mac then backs up that data and the fileserver data to an external hard drive all setup in retrospect.

The mac server only has space for 2 sata hard drives which are very full. We are therefore wondering, is it going to be better to buy an e-sata encolsure with another 2 drives installed for storage and backup, buy a 4/5 disk NAS device RAID and let that deal with the file sharing, or build a new box with several hard disks and run something like NASLite?

Or.. sack it all off and buy an Xserve RAID? Apple - Xserve RAID

drooooooooooool

XServe is nice, but pricey, especially as you'd need to have a Fibre to Ethernet NAS head (as XServe is more of a SAN than NAS solution).

I reckon you just need to be clear on what services you require on the storage device, and that will dictate what you can use / need. For example, is it just a Samba share, or do you also require native Mac network sharing? If it's purely used as a "backup" solution, then maybe FTP or other protocols would be sufficient in which case you have lots of options available to you

I'd also look at possibly simplifying your backup strategy - you have 3 levels of backup which don't necessarily give you 3 levels of security (thinking of fire) although you may be taking the external hard drive off site.

I am heading in the direction of a custom built box with 4 500gb drives in raid 5 running centos and samba, as it gives us the user level access we need.

xserve is pricey, but being an apple reseller we can get demo models for cheap!

Raid 5 is nice, as you've got much more protection and redundancy.

NAS boxes are OK, but you can have speed problems, with everything squeezing down one network connection -and the performance of some of the available boxes isn't great.

SAN is a whole different (and pricier) animal.

Phil

I am heading in the direction of a custom built box with 4 500gb drives in raid 5 running centos and samba, as it gives us the user level access we need.

Might be worth having a look at Freenas.

Has plenty of features and a handy webgui for setting things up. Although it does offer software raid I would stick to a hardware raid controller

Also keep in mind, in reality the paperless office does not exist. My employer is officially a paperless office, but the amount of paper we go through has only reduced slightly. Its far easier to read things on a printed piece of paper than a screen, so users will still print emails, and other stuff they dont really need to. So you increase your data storage requirements, but not a lot happens in reality to the amount of paper used.

I have installed FreeNAS on an old HP Netserve i have lieing around.. its good! very good.. but to create a new share you have to have a seperate partition, so i wont be using it. I have also tried openfiler but found it difficult to work with.

Our staff dont really print emails.. we are scanning in mail, invoices, statements, delivery sheets etc so that we dont have to file them away and take up valuable space archiving rubbish. We then shred and recycle the paper.

I have installed FreeNAS on an old HP Netserve i have lieing around.. its good! very good.. but to create a new share you have to have a seperate partition, so i wont be using it. I have also tried openfiler but found it difficult to work with.

Our staff dont really print emails.. we are scanning in mail, invoices, statements, delivery sheets etc so that we dont have to file them away and take up valuable space archiving rubbish. We then shred and recycle the paper.

You can get around that by partitioning the drive(s) up and then present them to Freenas. But I agree that is a draw back of Freenas hopefully something they will address in time

What about Windows 2003 Storage server? (altho f00k knows what the difference is between that and standard edition lol)

I guess the cheapest way to go about it would be to build something yourself, or get a cheap dell poweredge that takes sata discs.. they are only a couple of hundred quid and you get some decent Raid features and general interoperability

If your data is important get RAID 6.

The reason I say this is that if a drive dies on RAID5 then a club hand pulls out the wrong drive your array is most likely foobar.

If you are running out of space how about 12TB in 2u? There are plenty of places that sell this.