I’m looking at replacing our current w2k8r2 Storage Server based NAS sometime next year. Currently we have two DELL NX3200 each with about 15Tb of storage. The storage is RAID10 and is split into 8 basic volumes (to stop things getting too big) the biggest volumes being around 2.5Tb. We have 4 volumes that are shared amongst our users and use user based enumeration as well as NTFS permission, a volume for users Home Dirs (with a quota) and two volumes where users can “archive” stuff, basically like their HomeDirs but with no quota, and finally a scratch volume (basically a dumping ground). So each user gets (depending on permissions) a couple of mapped drives to shared volumes, a mapped drive to their home Dir and a mapped drive to their “archive”
We use DFSR for some of the smaller volumes and RSYNC to sync other larger volumes a couple of times a day. Users are mapped to one of the servers and the other is there purely for a basic DR.
I’m looking at improving on this without spending too much cash! So I‘m after some ideas, but am thinking Storage Replica with server 2016. I was thinking of getting a couple of DELL xxx servers with say 8*4Tb RAID 6 giving around 24Tb RAW with a 14 bay server I’ll then have room for a couple of boot SSDs, a Hot Spare and room for a couple of SSDs for the logs and a spare bay. I could then set this up as a basic server-server replica and put it in to our DFS to give us a manual DR failover (don’t really need any more than that so I don’t need a failover cluster)
I’m a little confused as to how I would configure the volumes? At present we have 8 volumes that I can easily expand. With storage replica do you need a log volume per 1 data volume? (could get messy), can theses log volumes be on 1 or 2 disks or is it 1 log volume per disk?
Any ideas on how to best achieve what I want (basically replicating 24Tb between two servers!) would be appreciated. Or any ideas as to how best to configure the new FS, our basic FS design hasn't changed in years but that amount of data has and volumes are getting pretty big!
