Recommend me a....

[mrbios]

...Backup NAS.

 

I'm after consolidating 3 crappy SANs that currently act as backup/archive/lab stuff into one slightly fancier NAS. Need it to act as a backup location for D2D and VMware recovery point backups from Arcserve. On top of that I'm going to use it to host a bunch of VMs for the lab/testing network (nothing particularly strenuous). Probably after 12TB writable space minimum after RAID6. Rackmount but no bigger than 3U.

 

Any recommendations? Considering a QNAP box at the moment, not worked with one of those before though.

[sted]

id be tempted to get a hp microserver (they often have cash back) stuff it full of drives and 8gb of ram and use freenas personally Edited May 25, 2016 by sted

[3s-gtech]

Synology do a range of lovely looking rackmount models. Not used those myself, but have a few others, like the DS1513+ which is ace (also has the bolt-on expansion module making it huge). Should do what you need - I haven't used it for direct VM hosting but I have mounted them useably from a ropey (9 years old) Terastation so it will be better than that.

[TechMonkey]

Synology. We have 2 currently (backup and offsite-ish backup) and looking at getting a third for CCTV. Brilliant devices and getting better. Infact after using them here I went and bought one for home use.

[caffrey]

What did you go for ? I'm looking at putting some form of NAS in a remote secure cabinet in another building and using backupassist.

• I've tried Synology and disliked the support to the point where I will never consider their products ever again
  
• Qnap - never tried them before and I've read their support is just as bad as Synology
  
• Some homebrew whitebox
  
• 
  

 

 

There's not a tonne of space in the cab and there's no depth for a rackmount, I could just get a HP Microserver and put it on the top of the cab I suppose.

[Oaktech]

How much are you looking to spend? Comms express have good deals on the Buffalo pro range of NAS. I've always been a fan of QNAP, but I agree, their support is getting worse and I wouldn't buy a Synology if you paid me.

 

The brand i've had the best experience with has been EMCLenovo offerings but you're talking real money for them.

[caffrey]

Difficult to find something that fits our needs, I'm thinking Hp Microserver / Freenas / BackupAssist and possibly RSYNCing to it

[Oaktech]

Difficult to find something that fits our needs, I'm thinking Hp Microserver / Freenas / BackupAssist and possibly RSYNCing to it

 

The EMCLenovo boxes have built in rsync, but I think they are rackmount now.

 

I've done a similar excercise and I ended up with a bog standard beige ATX case with a motherboard with I think, 12 sata ports and software raid. we made custom brackets in DT and managed to stash all 12 drives in it, plus a fan added to the back and side of the case. I think we used it as our disk to disk location for about 3 years!

[TIOAOA]

I'm in a similar boat to @mrbios, but I'd like something with a good reliable sync to GAFE facility, used a synology but the cloud integration seems patchy at best, although that could be down to our poor internet connection.

[mrbios]

I went with a QNAP TVS-1271U in the end.

 

I've not really had a chance to attack it yet, I've replaced our old junk with it but it's just sharing two stores via iSCSI for the time being and doing very little else. Hopefully i'll get a chance to play around with it properly after the summer. Quicker than the other two boxes i replaced with it though.

 

It's nice just having two SAN/NAS boxes again rather than 3 SANs and 1 NAS! (Started to get a bit silly having lots of cheap slow boxes doing individual jobs) Got my Nimble CS215 running the main network storage and VMs, and the QNAP on backup duty.

Edited June 29, 2016 by mrbios