i need some recommendations

this is for a satellite office in australia (main office and primary datacenter in the US) - currently just 4 employees but likely 8 by end of the year - likely won't need more than 1TB of storage as most things are still stored either at the main office or in a fileserver at our primary datacenter

needs to be extremely low maintenance - provide shared storage - preferably a built-in protected directory system for users (the laptops used by employees in this office are not on the domain)

i'm leaning towards just buying either the drobo standalone (4-bay) with the network add-on or the drobo that has the networking portion built in (5-bay) - price is a consideration and the drobo seems slightly more expensive than the competition but feature-wise seems easy and simple and doesn't seem to bother with any of the 'media streaming' features that aren't needed and it integrates with time machine (the 4 laptops at the office are currently all macs)

5/9/2011 8:02:24 AM

Definitely 100% do not get the regular drobo and the add on network thingy. I have it, and it definitely gets the job done with decent speed, but an office using it regularly would more than bring it to it's knees.

The new drobos with built in networking (the 5 bay units) are easily 2, maybe 3 times as fast. They reworked the storage processors and the networking.

But the king of this space is still the ReadyNAS line - and for less than 10 users I'd have an NV+. For another $100 you can set two of them up to automatically remote sync hassle free. Or if you're really hard up for cash you can go with something like some cheap buffalo units and leave a netbook or microPC running to handle the synching for you. This last setup is what I'm using to sync stuff with my dads house in case of fire. Two of the 2TB RAID1 buffalo NAS units and a linux microPC I paid like $80 for to handle syncing. Sits under my router happily churning away.

5/9/2011 10:31:30 AM

Build a simple PC with a few RAID controllers and use FreeNAS.

5/10/2011 3:56:12 PM

i'd get something like a 1U dell with a raid5 or raid10 array of 1TB 2.5mm disks. I'd install esxi on a thumb drive and boot from that. on esxi i'd have a satellite DC VM for directory stuff that could also present cifs shares and another vm that could present nfs or block level stuff via opensolaris. this way your VMs can scale if the office grows and you can throw more virtual appliances on as needed. also, a hardware upgrade doesn't effect the OS of the VMs

5/10/2011 6:07:28 PM

i won't be using a PC for this - if this were for my home it's a viable option but not for something that needs to be almost 100% maintenance free - i don't need any of the extra added benefits of having a PC and for the pennies that i might save in cost my time is worth more than the savings i'm willing to bet - it needs to be able to be supported by non-technical people when i'm out of the office and by supported i mean turn off and turn back on if something isn't working

i'm fairly convinced that readynas or drobo are the two solutions that work the best as far as easy to manage and easy to expand/replace storage

5/10/2011 7:21:37 PM

what kind of storage array likes being power cycled? what im getting at is what kind of storage array can be serviced by a non-techie? I guess a file-level system could maybe handle something like that and just autorun fsck at boot

5/10/2011 7:26:03 PM

About to pick up a QNAP TS-559 Pro+. Can give you a better idea of how simple it is in about a week.

5/10/2011 9:59:14 PM

Don't know what your budget is, but search around for a StoreVault. I used to deal with them when I was at NetApp. They run a lite version of the NetApp OS which is killer when it comes to NAS. Also does iSCSI if you happen to need that down the round. Includes Snapshots too so you have some level of data protection.

Actually we are in the process of releasing a new NAS appliance at the startup I work for now. We have a desktop sized unit that does a couple TB. Super fast, I'll look into the pricing today to see if it's anywhere reasonable.

Both of these solutions are more enterprise quality while a lot of the Buffalo type products are somewhere between consumer grade and really small business grade. If you are serious about hassle / maintenance free I would consider spending a little extra for a box that you can pretty much guarantee not to have to touch for 3+ years.

[Edited on May 11, 2011 at 7:33 AM. Reason : more]

5/11/2011 7:30:22 AM

locally the readynas nv+ is about $375 and the drobo fs is about $875 - i presented both options to the bossman today and told him the readynas solution is the one to go with but his son is in love with the drobo units for some reason so we'll see

i like that for both of the solutions that you can buy the exact same one for the US office and replicate the data there

planning to start off with just two 1TB drives in them so we'll see

5/11/2011 7:42:08 AM

I have the ReadyNAS NV+ and have been pretty happy with it.

5/11/2011 5:28:37 PM