Server Advice

[tmar]

My company recently invested in 2 NAS drives to use as file servers for roughly 2TB of data. One is the primary server and the other we use for backing up the data from the first. This was done by my IT person a month or so before he left and I now have a new IT person in his place.

We've had quite a few issues with the drives, some small/nagging and some pretty major. Right now my primary concern is that our external IT provider has been unable to get their virus protection on the data and the NAS drives (which aren't meant to be file servers per my new IT guy) run a little slow and lock up occasionally. Also as of right now we aren't getting off site backups to our BDR which is provided by our external IT Provider but they think there might be a solution for that.

We are planning on a major hardware upgrade in 12-15 months due to an IT project regarding a new ERP and at that time will include an upgraded file server. What I'm looking for is a 12-15 month inexpensive patch to get me past my major concerns without killing our budget. So far my new IT guy has focused only on new File Server options that would run $8-13,000 and that's just too much for a temporary solution. I'd suggested possibly buying a refurbished server for around half of that price but he's not into that at all. One option is just to button up our redundancy and deal with the risk/slowness for the next 12-15 months.

Any advice or options I'm not seeing? Basically we are looking for an inexpensive mechanism to act as a File Server for 2TB of data that can be reliably backed up and protected from Viruses etc. We have about 150 users that access data on those servers but most access different areas of the server.

 

[goombawaho]

What NAS device are these drives in? It shouldn't be locking up at all. I would use something like this to transplant the drives into and run this for the short term. If you wanted to get a fancier (more expensive model) you could have higher RAID levels and more redundancy and even run with this permanently. If you can't transplant the drives, you could have a basic unit + enterprise class hard drives for in $500 - $700 range for a RAID1 with 2TB storage.

$306 for the NAS (higher or lower depending on which model you pick)
$300 (2 x $150) Western Digital RE WD2000FYYZ 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Enterprise Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

QNAP TS-251 - basic unit that can do RAID1. Spend more for a more powerful unit.
Link
I used a QNAP TS-220 at a 5 person office for 1.5 years with two hard drives in a RAID1 config. Never a lockup or unscheduled restart.
These have integrated ability for scheduled virus updates and scans.

For backup, I used Mozy Pro running on one of the office computers to backup the entire NAS. You have to pay for a "server license" but it's rock solid backup.

One more thing - don't let you new IT guy say that everything the old IT people did is TOTALLY wrong. And don't trust that the new IT guy knows everything about the BEST way to do things. There are many ways to accomplish the same thing. Don't have too much faith - ask a lot of questions. Why do you like this? How much? Data backup? RAID Level?

Be a tough consumer.

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