Best solution for file storage.

[DevilsAdvocate]

Hi all,

 

We have 4-5 fairly old hardware servers being used as file servers (totalling about 6TB of data). I want to try and cut down on the amount of these and centralise the storage of the data (with redundancy of course). What is my best solution here? I'd still like to keep the separate server structure so would presumably need to look into virtualising them? What kind of hardware should I be looking at? We are running mainly HP equipment so would prefer to stick to that and Microsoft software if we can.

 

Thanks in advance.

[dhicks]

What is my best solution here? I'd still like to keep the separate server structure so would presumably need to look into virtualising them? What kind of hardware should I be looking at? We are running mainly HP equipment so would prefer to stick to that and Microsoft software if we can.

 

If you just want a file server, I'm sure HP will do you a 2U 12-disk storage server (or 4U, 24-disk, if you want to allow for future expansion), complete with hardware RAID and stuffed full of whatever size/speed disks you would prefer. Install Windows Server on it, set up some file shares and away you go. For redundancy / backup, I'd go for a second server that the main server backs up to periodically - our setup backs up via rsync (which alos runs on Windows) every hour, giving users access to hourly backups for the past three days and daily backups thereafter.

[strawberry]

Buy a new whizzy server, Set up DFRS so the old ones replicate to the new one and in time retire the old ones, When enough are retired buy another whizzy server to compliment the existing one.

[zag]

We have 2 identical file servers virtualized with hyper-v on different hardware boxes in different physical locations.

 

Both have 600GB intel SSD drives in them.

 

Both have an identical file structure and I use this command to sync them manually

 

robocopy c:\data \\fileserver2\c$\data /MIR /s /e /R:5 /XF file autorun.inf 

 

We also back up the primary file server with Veeam each night.

 

The beauty of this solution is complete redundancy, complete control, simplicity and a blazingly quick File server.

Edited January 10, 2014 by zag