Advice for Small Business

[jc_cshmny]

Seeking some advice related to an upcoming NAS purchase for a small property owners association (non-profit). My wife works from home for the company while I provide website and other IT solutions for them on a part-time basis.

They would like to set up a backup solution at our house for their main server. They have asked me to recommend, purchase, and set up a backup solution and I think a desktop NAS would suit fine for their needs:

Weekly backup, off-site
RAID for redundancy, not necessarily speed
3x 1-2TB drives
Data encryption
Secure transport besides (S)FTP

Any suggestions are welcome. Including the cost of the drives, I need this project to come in under $1000. I think I have settled on the WD Red line of drives also, unless someone wants to talk me out of it.

 

[stevech]

Synology or QNAP. See reviews here.

These companies also have on-line NASes you can use to see the human factors.

 

[jc_cshmny]

I'm leaning towards the QNAP TS-419 PII at the moment. Newegg has it for $480. Only thing I'm concerned about is the lack of volume-based encryption and minimal RAM (which is also non-upgradable).

Anyone have experience with this particular QNAP? Is the $180 jump to the new TS-469L worth it??

 

[stevech]

read the reviews here, and skim the user forum for the vendor (remembering you'll read mostly the complainers).

 

[thiggins]

Since you are doing a remote backup, NAS performance is moot. So don't be concerned about RAM size. Also, if you encrypt (and compress) on the server side, you don't need to worry about that on the backup. Compression will also speed up your backup time.

Assuming the "main server" supports rsync, anything that also supports rsync will work. You can even run DeltaCopy on a WindowsPC and use it as the backup target.

How much data are you backing up?

 

[jc_cshmny]

Since you are doing a remote backup, NAS performance is moot. So don't be concerned about RAM size. Also, if you encrypt (and compress) on the server side, you don't need to worry about that on the backup. Compression will also speed up your backup time.

Assuming the "main server" supports rsync, anything that also supports rsync will work. You can even run DeltaCopy on a WindowsPC and use it as the backup target.

How much data are you backing up?

I was planning on either encrypting on the server side, or sending the data over secure transmission and encrypting on the backup side. Sounds like the former will be easier and allow me to buy the cheaper NAS.

Thanks for the link to DeltaCopy. This is a Windows 2003 or 2008 server with accounting data on it. I imagine it has quite a bit of data that will be backed up, but I am waiting on the final word in terms of GB.

Sounds like it's pretty safe to say the TS-419 PII will do for my application.

 

[jc_cshmny]

What do you guys think of this deal? Almost getting the HDs for free: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1219646

The Thecus seems to have less features but speedier hardware.

 

[stevech]

CPU speed is quite secondary to having good disks and good management software.

 

[thiggins]

CPU speed is quite secondary to having good disks and good management software.

Secondary for what? CPU is usually the prime factor in determining NAS performance.

 

[jc_cshmny]

The price jumped on the combo, so I think I'm going to go with the QNAP TS-219PII and fill it with 2x WD Red 2TB and do a RAID 1. The server in question is only about 80 GB worth of data, so I'll just set up deltacopy to rsync on a schedule for that data and use on-site to provide image backups.

 

[stevech]

Secondary for what? CPU is usually the prime factor in determining NAS performance.

Opinion Alert:
My experience has been that transfer rates for all but a doggy CPU NAS are limited by the disk drive's rotational and head movement latency and next by the LAN overhead. CPU utilization is quite low even high volume transfers. User interface response time seems to not slow noticeably despite high transfers. Just common "I/O bound" processing, not CPU bound.

This isn't true if the NAS is trying to do transcoding or photo thumbnail processing - both of which I say should be done as needed on a PC, not the NAS.