[TriLUG] NAS box

Brian McCullough bdmc at bdmcc-us.com
Sun May 2 23:36:55 EDT 2004


On Sun, May 02, 2004 at 10:58:33AM -0400, Kevin Flanagan wrote:
> Brian,
> 
> 
> 	I'd be looking for a lot more information before making a decision as
> to what's best.

You're right.  I was pretty general.


> 	- Define "LOTS of disk space" - GB, TB????

Hundreds of GB.



> 	- More info about the environment
> 		- How many windows systems, and how many are Win9x, how many W2K or
> up?

I'm not sure that I understand the difference, for the purposes of this
discussion, but there are three W2K, one XP Home that is due to become
W2K and four, if I remember correctly, of lesser grade.


> 		- Is there a centralized logon facility, NIS, NT Domain, Active
> Directory?

Samba is in control of that.

( NT Domain )


> 		- Lots of small files, big files, many transfers of small files, etc.


A mix.  In terms of bulk, the 370 MB and 1+ GB images are the heavy
hitters, the CAD and related files and < 1 MB are much the higher number
of files.



> 		- Backups?  Do you need to back this up?  


Yes.  ( Do they -- No! )



> 		- Amount of change, daily, weekly, monthly.


The images don't change.  They are converted from TIFF format and stored
on the network drive for use during the project.  There are three or
four projects ( possibly a few more ) in progress at once, consisting of
between a few images to over 200, with the CAD files changing
continuously.  I don't think that I mentioned before, but this is an
Aerial Photography -> Mapping shop.


> 		- Does this need to be one volume?  IE: Could you have 2 volumes, one
> for new data, one for the archive?


Physically, I don't have it on one volume at present.  Logically, it
seems to need to be on one "drive letter."


> 	- Budget?


Nil, right?


> 	- Other server class systems in the shop?  


None.



> I don't believe that workstation class systems should be used to do
> commercial server work.  

In fact, the heavy-duty workstations are the ones that are built on
server-class platforms.



> If this
> customer will go belly up if they loose this data, then it's worth the
> investment to protect it with Hardware RAID, and a real server or
> appliance system.  If the data is all transient, or exists elsewhere
> then you could look at the cheapest option and expect to replace it of
> you have a failure or outgrow it.


Unfortunately, in a way, this customer is on the verge of belly up at
all times ( small start-up ), and tries to run the equipment with no
scheduled maintenance windows, until it _must_ be taken down, at which
point they complain about its unreliability.



> I believe that it's very likely that you can do what you need with a
> Linux solution, having the background makes it even more likely.  But
> this doesn't sound like something that you just want to hang off a
> workstation and forget it.....



> Just my $.02

And very appreciated.



>   Kevin


Brian




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