Network storage

[Quillyn]

I am interested in people's advice, I have a problem no budget and a need for network storage.

 

In short what I have to work with is:

 

One retired server 2.8g Xeon with 4 g RAM component built before my time with 2 network cards.

 

What I need is network storage for our admin and curriculum networks ( on different ip ranges but the same physical network)

 

Do people think I would be best to ...

-use something like FreeNAS to handle our storage

- install windows server

- install a couple of virtualisations to handle the file sharing for each network.

 

 

Just interested in peoples thoughts and opinions really.

[SYNACK]

FreeNAS is free and will allow you to offer out raw storage via iSCSI which is a much better way of handling storage than some others.

[glennda]

depending on the Size of the device Open-E is very good for that kind of thing and free to a certain size (2tb). Edited August 28, 2012 by glennda

[Dos_Box]

Moving to Hardware forum.

[cpjitservices]

We have a similar situation here we have 2x 2TB drives in a Tower Server (HP) all we did is install CentOS and setup Samba so users can access folders/files on the drives.. The drives are mirrored with RAID but also an rsync script replicates all the data on those drives over to a server with the same setup but has 2x 6TB drives in (locally).

[jamesfed]

How many users and how much storage do you need?

 

We spent about £670 on hardware and about £50 on a Win Server Licence on this server - Inside a new Storage Server | my world of IT

[Quillyn]

Harley any users about 20, 1Tb of storage which is already in the machine striped and mirrored.

[dhicks]

use something like FreeNAS to handle our storage

 

FreeNAS is excellent - it seems to have every feature we could want, more so than our dedicated QNAP device. In particular, if your device has enough RAM it will support block-level deduplication.

[jamesfed]

Harley any users about 20, 1Tb of storage which is already in the machine striped and mirrored.

 

Any option to just upgrade whatever server you have already?

 

Also if you are in striped and mirrored (maybe you mean RAID 0+1) what about moving to just RAID1 or RAID5?

[Duke5A]

What are your plans for services? Plan on running DFS? Or is just going to be a vanilla file server? If it's nothing special, then just use whatever Windows Server edition that it shipped with. We're still running 2003 Storage Server on our 7TB NAS (HP DL380 G5) and have no plans to upgrade. Even 2003 Server Standard Edition would do what we need it to do.