Shared Storage for Large Files

[StephenPink]

Hey all,

 

Wondering what others are doing (if anything specific) for the large, and growing larger, amount of storage required for student work in subjects such as; Creative Media, Music, Graphic Design, Photography etc

 

Current thoughts are;

- Standard Windows File Server - at the moment, the hardware we have is too old/small and too slow. Perhaps an investment here would work better - but then reliant on local networking and probably don't want those subjects to affect the rest of the network

- Cloud storage - the local download/upload for caching and working seems and issue here. Maybe I'm wrong...

- Localised NAS - not sure how I feel about this, but some form of networked NAS that is physically located in the subject areas to serve their work?

 

Open to ideas and suggestions! Obviously whatever route we go down has implications;

- Cost is the biggest factor of course...

- Would need to backed up, ideally in line with the rest of the infrastructure backups (currently Veeam)

 

 

Cheers,

Stephen

[BKGarry]

I would invest in a newer bigger file server

but set DFS when migrating, then you can add more later etc and expand that way.

 

All of those subject areas here still have home drives on our windows file server, including the macs. Make sure the Access Based Enumeration is turned on with the shares, so if they go up a level, they can still only see their folders. I would not say that those subjects would be affecting the rest of the network at all. As it is only those subjects you listed above that are saving to the local file server, I have about 350gb of usage on the server, with plenty of free space.

[StephenPink]

I would invest in a newer bigger file server

but set DFS when migrating, then you can add more later etc and expand that way.

 

All of those subject areas here still have home drives on our windows file server, including the macs. Make sure the Access Based Enumeration is turned on with the shares, so if they go up a level, they can still only see their folders. I would not say that those subjects would be affecting the rest of the network at all. As it is only those subjects you listed above that are saving to the local file server, I have about 350gb of usage on the server, with plenty of free space.

 

Thanks appreciated - yes I configured DFS at the other site, actually as part of a File Server Cluster.

 

We're talking about ~50GB per student, without around 300 students in Media alone though - it's the scale here (and the current state of the network) that is making me question it. There is a current Media share that is 14TB and has around 2TB free...

 

I was wondering as well in terms of affecting the otheer subjects and network access across the site, when all teaching simultaneously and trying to read/write to the same storage (or keep them separate)

 

Hopefully that makes sense!

 

Cheers

[dhicks]

Cloud storage - the local download/upload for caching and working seems and issue here.

 

We use Google Drive, accesible from ChromeOS and from the Google Drive client installed on all our Windows and MacOS machines. The Google Drive client lets you save files locally (with local performance) and have them automatically sync to the cloud when they can. You can tweak the settings in the Google Drive client installer to allow for larger local caching usage, which might be a good idea. You might have to get users into the habit of checking their files have synced before they log off. I think this all applies to Microsoft OneDrive as well, although that's not something I use every day so I'm not sure.

 

We back our Google Drive (both individual user drives and shared drives) to a local Synology NAS, which then itself gets backed up to a cloud backup provider (Backblaze).

[mikes]

Luckily we had a large NAS - 13TB which is enough, still have 4TB free. We are actually going down on space due to the cloud - the newer users use it a lot more. Our system is a bit shabby though as we have two systems - a hybrid local AD/O365, and a totally separate G-suite system - so kids need two U/P's. Wondering what to replace it with.

But storage is so cheap, I can back up our entire data (apart from the cloud) on a cheap bitlockered Amazon HDD that cost about £90, as a backup of a backup.

[Brimstone]

I would strongly look at a Synology, if your creative and macOS users are anythiny to go by my experience they will need large amounts of storage and that just take too long to sync using Google or One drives syncing feature. Synology can also be then backed up to the cloud

[psydii]

OneDrive syncing / Class Teams ( Student Work Document Library)

 

Seating plans (so in general only files changed that lesson need to sync).

 

About 30TB of files across 2000ish users.

 

365 A5

 

1Gbit/sec symmetric internet typically in any given 5 minute period during the school day we see 60-70% utilisation down, 10-30% up.

[BKGarry]

Luckily we had a large NAS - 13TB which is enough, still have 4TB free. We are actually going down on space due to the cloud - the newer users use it a lot more. Our system is a bit shabby though as we have two systems - a hybrid local AD/O365, and a totally separate G-suite system - so kids need two U/P's. Wondering what to replace it with.

But storage is so cheap, I can back up our entire data (apart from the cloud) on a cheap bitlockered Amazon HDD that cost about £90, as a backup of a backup.

I sync both. Office 365 runs all as normal, Google is synced with the directory and password sync with Gmail disabled. All the same details then

[jmak]

Does anyone use Nextcloud?

 

SharePoint or Google Drive work really well for a significant subset of our users, but now that storage isn't unlimited, we can't allocate the quotas with enough granularity. Even if we paid for more storage, it wouldn't go to the users we want it to.

 

Nextcloud looks like it gives the local sync options and we could sort the storage the way we want to.