I have a direct mail marketing business with about 10 employees.
Our earlier network administrator set up the following network for us.
A huge gigabit NAS with two racks with about 5 chassis and 20 50GB SCSI drives. They are all set up in a RAID 5.
The file server software is SAMBA. The NAS is linked to a Gigabit switch to which all our computers are linked. We use about 750 GB worth of data.
All our machines are Windows machines. We will be adding two MACS as well shortly. All of our office data is stored on the NAS. We do not store any local copies of the files. Some of the files stored on the NAS are very big especially the files used by our designers. During office hours, the NAS will be used extensively by every department. The sales department will use it to create new order folders and copy files to those folders. Our data department has all the data stored on the NAS and constantly queries the data and creates files for our orders through the day using foxplus. The design department creates designs using Illustrator, Photoshop etc. and work with and save the files on the NAS.
The problem with the current set up is everything is in UNIX and we have to rely on the guy who set our network up to fix even minor problems. Secondly, the whole set up has a huge footprint. We have two big unix machines that run the OS and everything else that enable the set up. They take up a rack by themselves and the NAS itself (with the drives) takes up another rack. Inspite of all that, we still have issues with speed where sometimes, for no apparent reason, files take forever to open etc. and I definitely don't like what this has done to our electricity bill. most of the equipment is second hand and kind of old.
I was looking at the following two NAS solutions as an alternative
Netgear ReadyNAS pro
Thecus N7700+
However, I have the following questions.
1.) Will the drives in either box equal SCSI in reliability/speed?
2.) Will it handle the load especially the transfer of big files by the design department. There will be only 10 concurrent users but reliability and speed are huge and there will be considerable stress on the box. The last thing I want is the network slowing to a crawl. The gigabit speed especially for our design and data departments is very important.
3.) We have a domain with all user authentications being done using LDAP. How does it integrate into LDAP? WIll it even integrate. if not, what are my options for user access?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Our earlier network administrator set up the following network for us.
A huge gigabit NAS with two racks with about 5 chassis and 20 50GB SCSI drives. They are all set up in a RAID 5.
The file server software is SAMBA. The NAS is linked to a Gigabit switch to which all our computers are linked. We use about 750 GB worth of data.
All our machines are Windows machines. We will be adding two MACS as well shortly. All of our office data is stored on the NAS. We do not store any local copies of the files. Some of the files stored on the NAS are very big especially the files used by our designers. During office hours, the NAS will be used extensively by every department. The sales department will use it to create new order folders and copy files to those folders. Our data department has all the data stored on the NAS and constantly queries the data and creates files for our orders through the day using foxplus. The design department creates designs using Illustrator, Photoshop etc. and work with and save the files on the NAS.
The problem with the current set up is everything is in UNIX and we have to rely on the guy who set our network up to fix even minor problems. Secondly, the whole set up has a huge footprint. We have two big unix machines that run the OS and everything else that enable the set up. They take up a rack by themselves and the NAS itself (with the drives) takes up another rack. Inspite of all that, we still have issues with speed where sometimes, for no apparent reason, files take forever to open etc. and I definitely don't like what this has done to our electricity bill. most of the equipment is second hand and kind of old.
I was looking at the following two NAS solutions as an alternative
Netgear ReadyNAS pro
Thecus N7700+
However, I have the following questions.
1.) Will the drives in either box equal SCSI in reliability/speed?
2.) Will it handle the load especially the transfer of big files by the design department. There will be only 10 concurrent users but reliability and speed are huge and there will be considerable stress on the box. The last thing I want is the network slowing to a crawl. The gigabit speed especially for our design and data departments is very important.
3.) We have a domain with all user authentications being done using LDAP. How does it integrate into LDAP? WIll it even integrate. if not, what are my options for user access?
Thanks for any suggestions.
