NAS needed
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If the load is pretty low, I would say try this.
http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?sn=822&c=351&sc=514&t=522&n=18376
I just bought one for myself, popped in four 2TB hard drives. It supports iSCSI, NFS, SMB, LMNOP, BBQ and WTF. Even one of the two drive boxes would do you good, supports the same protocols.
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@PSX_Defector said:
If the load is pretty low, I would say try this.
http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?sn=822&c=351&sc=514&t=522&n=18376
I just bought one for myself, popped in four 2TB hard drives. It supports iSCSI, NFS, SMB, LMNOP, BBQ and WTF. Even one of the two drive boxes would do you good, supports the same protocols.
It's the support that is the problem. QNAP if you read their full SLA is "you'll get a new box, two weeks after you send us your old one." For home, that's fine. For a business, it's bad. Stick to the business class devices unless you plan to buy a second just to have on hand to do the job while the first one is in its two weeks hiatus.
And getting support is reportedly nearly impossible. @John-Nicholson has had a terrible time getting any support on them and what he got had to be done in Mandarin - which most of us lack as a support option.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's the support that is the problem. QNAP if you read their full SLA is "you'll get a new box, two weeks after you send us your old one." For home, that's fine. For a business, it's bad. Stick to the business class devices unless you plan to buy a second just to have on hand to do the job while the first one is in its two weeks hiatus.
I don't see where you see that.
http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?lang=en&sn=855
QNAP is saying that warranty work is supposed to go through the vendor/authorized reseller. And even if you use them for service, you are paying full freight either way. I've never known a vendor who wouldn't do an advanced RMA anyways, so if it popped on Friday, it would be on the next slow boat from China on Monday.
And getting support is reportedly nearly impossible. @John-Nicholson has had a terrible time getting any support on them and what he got had to be done in Mandarin - which most of us lack as a support option.
Huh? That don't make sense. Even when I had to get support from Peplink, a very Chinese company, it was always in English. Anyone NOT doing business in English will find themselves without customers.
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@PSX_Defector said:
QNAP is saying that warranty work is supposed to go through the vendor/authorized reseller. And even if you use them for service, you are paying full freight either way. I've never known a vendor who wouldn't do an advanced RMA anyways, so if it popped on Friday, it would be on the next slow boat from China on Monday.
I can get a Netgear replacement in Dallas in 2-3 hours.
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@PSX_Defector said:
Huh? That don't make sense. Even when I had to get support from Peplink, a very Chinese company, it was always in English. Anyone NOT doing business in English will find themselves without customers.
Not QNAP. People buying their products aren't researching them much or listening to feedback. This has come up in online forums so many times but people just keep buying them and touting that they "have no issues." But ask people if they've actually tried to get support and you find out that all the people pushing them are the ones who have gotten lucky and never dealt with support and base their business recommendations on their use case of a device that hadn't failed - so they had no idea if they would get support or not.
QNAP also got caught putting random drives on their HCL, ones that weren't even compatible with the system. They since changed this, but it was all made up as it didn't matter for a long time.
You assume that QNAP loses customers because of support issues. But they are a consumer class company that a lot of SMBs buy because they are cheap. When people are buying QNAP, they aren't doing so because of lots of good reports or experience about support. They are talking to people without any experience, checking a price and buying without researching or caring. The SMB mostly operates like a consumer and consumer markets don't have the negative reaction to lack of support that real businesses do.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@PSX_Defector said:
QNAP is saying that warranty work is supposed to go through the vendor/authorized reseller. And even if you use them for service, you are paying full freight either way. I've never known a vendor who wouldn't do an advanced RMA anyways, so if it popped on Friday, it would be on the next slow boat from China on Monday.
I can get a Netgear replacement in Dallas in 2-3 hours.
From Ingram Micro. Who is a QNAP reseller.
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@PSX_Defector said:
From Ingram Micro. Who is a QNAP reseller.
No idea, I've never seen anyone selling QNAP in a business space.
Yes, IM is the local logistics handler for Netgear and their partners.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You assume that QNAP loses customers because of support issues. But they are a consumer class company that a lot of SMBs buy because they are cheap.
Their prices are pretty much in line with all the same levels of equipment out there in that category. If we want enterprise level support, we should be buying enterprise equipment. But we have to balance what is needed versus what we want. A store that someone is gonna have two boxes accessing doesn't require an Equalogic or NetApp.
Support for this category of device should be considered, but it's not even close to what we can get from any proper vendor. But no vendor is gonna deal with US customers in only Mandarin. Not even those cheap knockoff resellers of eyePhonee's only deal in Mandarin.
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Of course, that's why we refer to the ReadyNAS, ReadyDATA, Synology, Buffalo, IoSafe and Drobo family as the "SMB Business" family. They are all similar in support and reliability and quality. They are vary and there are arguments for any of them and everyone has their favourites. And some people include Thecus here, I have zero personal experience with Thecus and nothing but negative second hand stories but not from people I trust as references, so I have no opinion. They are not enterprise at all, of course not. But they are way above hobby too. It's some serious gear, but with important support notes that need to be considered.
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I was thinking if I got the Synology Disk Station DS214se I could use it with JBOD instead of RAID.
One drive could be the shared drive and the other drive could be the backup drive.
Would that work or do I just need 2 devices?
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@technobabble said:
I was thinking if I got the Synology Disk Station DS214se I could use it with JBOD instead of RAID.
One drive could be the shared drive and the other drive could be the backup drive.
Would that work or do I just need 2 devices?
You want a SINGLE device to be both the server AND the backup. AND you want both your server storage AND your backup storage to lack RAID?
Simple rule of thumb, if it isn't worth having RAID, you should rethink why you are storing it.
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Not that there isn't any use case ever where RAID isn't overkill. But you should, once the thought of skipping RAID crosses your mind, as well as the thought of having both storage and backup be the same device crosses your mind, sit down and ask yourself why this data exists and why you are spending a penny to store it.
I have an article coming out, but this violates my "home line" rule with business. If a business falls below the line at which I draw for basic home use... they need to reconsider why they are in business if they don't think of their business in the same terms that I think of my casual storage at home.
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@technobabble said:
I was thinking if I got the Synology Disk Station DS214se I could use it with JBOD instead of RAID.
One drive could be the shared drive and the other drive could be the backup drive.
Would that work or do I just need 2 devices?
One of the things I like about the QNAP I got is that I can hook up a USB drive to it and have it run backups of the stuff straight to it. And since it will write to NTFS, if your device blows up, you won't have to be running around trying to figure out how to mount an EXT4 drive to a Windows machine. That's one of the problems with these NAS devices, is getting it to play nice nice with Windows if/when you have a failure and have to raw handle the drive. On any modern Linux distro, no prob. But if you are asking this, odds are you are probably more Windows oriented.
Assuming not big data, e.g. database writes, just about anything will do to be honest. It's only a few machines, not the entire enterprise. That's why we can stick with cheap. Hell, a big giant workstation running Windows would suffice.
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A lot of devices in this category will do direct to USB backups. That's fairly common.
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@scottalanmiller I asked this question because of those who posted "why not use the cloud or a PC share instead of NAS". Neither usually has RAID and is sort of like a network share..
Since I looked at the specs and saw that it included JBOD or RAID it seemed like a good question to ask, espeically for a small business with only 2 PCs (which don't have RAID). I presumed in this case the professional thing was to provide network storage instead of sharing a PC's hard drive or hanging a USB device off a PC and sharing that.
Keeping it simple with backup using same device but separate hard drives didn't seem to be casual storage to me.
I am a big fan of RAID and have used it consumer devices before I even worked on servers. However when did the rule become all devices that store data or share data must have RAID for all business needs?
Yes I would prefer selling my client a pair of these, one for backup and one for sharing the files. However as I said in my original post we don't have much data yet. I would be it is way below 100 GB. And then there is the reality of businesses budget or lack thereof.
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@technobabble said:
@scottalanmiller I asked this question because of those who posted "why not use the cloud or a PC share instead of NAS". Neither usually has RAID and is sort of like a network share..
Well I'd answer the same thing to the desktop answers... if you are thinking of using a desktop, rethink that storage.
And cloud doesn't usually have RAID? No enterprise cloud doesn't have RAID as well as backups. The cloud option is the most reliable. Worlds beyond running your own NAS.
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@technobabble said:
I am a big fan of RAID and have used it consumer devices before I even worked on servers. However when did the rule become all devices that store data or share data must have RAID for all business needs?
The rule came from before my time. In the mid to early 1990s. Basically with the advent of people using Winchester (what you call hard) drives as primary storage. Once that happened, RAID was the only answer to their fragility. So it's been decades now.
Like I said, there are exceptions, but it should trigger a serious conversation. I would never do this for my own personal data at home, why would I do it in something claiming to be a business?
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@technobabble said:
Yes I would prefer selling my client a pair of these, one for backup and one for sharing the files. However as I said in my original post we don't have much data yet. I would be it is way below 100 GB. And then there is the reality of businesses budget or lack thereof.
Why is anything but cloud on the table really? Cloud will be free (literally, there are several free options at that size) and worlds beyond anything that you can do in house. I don't see what use case, at that scale (in GB and users) that anything but cloud would be on the table. Everything other than cloud puts them at higher dataloss risk while wasting money.
What's the reason for looking at a local solution. I suppose if they are on dialup.
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@scottalanmiller My experience with Onedrive (consumer) and Dropbox have been fine, but my ODfB experience has not.
Dropbox is $15/month. I will see if they want to do a free trial to see if it fits for them. Perhaps Max Focus Online Backup will suffice as their backup.
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@technobabble said:
@scottalanmiller My experience with Onedrive (consumer) and Dropbox have been fine, but my ODfB experience has not.
Dropbox is $15/month. I will see if they want to do a free trial to see if it fits for them. Perhaps Max Focus Online Backup will suffice as their backup.
There are LOTS of options. At that size Dropbox can be free. And there is Google Drive. For now, at least, they don't have to really worry about anything.
AetherStore would be an option for them too. Get them started now and it will grow with them as they add people or machines.
