Answered NAS For a Small Business?

Afrodanx8

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Hello all,

I have been tasked by my company of setting up a NAS System for them, Within the company there are around 15 employees who will need to access this NAS some are in our main office and some are in our secondary office down south , ideally i need a system that both the northern office and the southern office will be able to access as well as engineers on the go, i have a budget of as close to £1000 as possible. The system storage wise will only need between 8-16TB and preferable it would be easy to setup and access ( Some of the employees are of the ..."older" Generation and not as technologically advanced :') )

if you need anymore info let me know,

any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated,

Kind Regards,
Dan
 
As an SME, you should consider cloud storage for easy of access, backup and maintenance. Do you use Office365 as a business?

What solution do you use at the moment?
 
If electing to use on-prem server with 1k budget I’d look at used dell server with redundant psu and run freenas. Use the remaining budget for WD red drives. Cloud likely still better as the upfront capital expenditure is far lower, it more scalable and you avoid duplicating the system for backup. One would assume it’s business critical so reliability and uptime is key.
 
Thanks for the suggestions ,i will have a look into the dell systems, We currently use a Google drive based folder which everyone can access however this does cause some issues with duplicate copies of excel files being created due to two people editing and saving it at the same time ( Is there any way around this with a on-Prem NAS?), a friend has recommended the NETGEAR ReadyNAS 214 4-Bay system with 4 x WD Red Drives have you had any experience with these or do you have an opinion on this system ?
 
I can't help but feel you are moving backwards.

8-16TB is a lot of storage, particularly if its lots of Excel but I appreciate you haven't given all the details but it seems like a lot of space for an office with not that many users.

As @Markr123 states you have to think about backup and maintenance on premises, on top of that I would add

1) RAID - isn't backup! So you need a separate backup solution and regime, easy to forget and you want some off site storage for backup in case the worse happens
2) UPS - For something storing data in an office environment it should at the very least have UPS to protect for that time when the power dies and all your data goes toast with it.
3) Office Internet connectivity - what do you use, fairly small so are you using an an asymmetric business broadband, in which case you need a decent upload speed as those outside of main office may have much slower access to the files
4) Securing access to the files\server - you need to have a secure route through your firewall and appropriate authentication to the server before granting file access to your users
5) Doesn't solve the multiple access issue
6) You become mr fixit man ....

The ReadyNAS is a home server from their own website

4 Bays with up to 40TB Storage
Media Hub for Your Home
Fast Secure Access and Backup
ReadyNAS brings best-of-breed technologies and features with simple easy-to-use functionality. With up to 40TB of storage, download speeds up to 200MBps and full HD 1080p transcoding capability you'll have the ultimate networked attached storage for your media-rich home.

Its a home solution, whilst I am sure it would work in the office environment its not designed as such and I wouldn't want my business relying on it.

I would look an Office 365 and OneDrive for Business so you can co-author Excel if that is an important requirement. It takes the headache of managing a local NAS.

Collaborate on Excel workbooks at the same time with co-authoring
 
Thanks for all the info, i think i am going to try and persuade them to go down the onedrive route as hopefully this will cause me less of headache when issues come up as i already am mr fixit with any sort of technology issues !!:facepalm:
 

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