Need your help!

[psp83]

Hi all.

At work, we have a server that us coders/designers use.

Sales and management upstairs work local and finding it hard to keep up with whats going on etc. They asked me to get a NAS drive and set it up for them so they can all work from it and have access to all the files.

So heres my question, what NAS drive would you use for this? it needs to be stable as they will be working from it roughly 10hrs a day. Also built in FTP would be great for them aswell.

Paul

[Dangerjunkie]

Hi,

I hate it when management people read sales leaflets and have to have one...

Exactly what do the want to do with it? How big are the files? What kinds of files? How important are these files if they were to get lost? What do you do for backups?

There's a range of stand-alone products that could do this (if you don't want to have a shared drive on one of your existing servers, hopefully that gets backed up.)

There are a number of reasons not to use a NAS. Many of these are down to security. How will you control who will access what? How will you find out who accessed what? Do you really want to allow people to log in from home and copy your data? Is the data covered by the Data Protection Act? How will you back it up? Will it encourage bad data practices or encourage people to be lazy and bypass business processes?

You can get a cheap standalone product for as little as about £150 but if this is mission critical you may need something a little more manly. 

Cheers,
Paul.

[somanyholes]

I'd have a look at freenas http://www.freenas.org/

you can build your own, highly customiseable, supports authentication, logging, raid etc. worth a look anyway.

[Sebby]

I installed a Buffalo LinkStation in a business and it seemed pretty good (that was following a recommendation from a PC mag). Plus I believe it's very hackable, if you so wish (Linux and all that).

[psp83]

Basically, Sales and Management want to keep all there files in one location. They have alot of documents and stuff sent to them that they need to keep in one place..

I've already told them they are not getting access to the coders/designers server as i'm in control of all technical stuff and i dont want them messing around with the server or having access to files i take care of (its good telling management what to do lol)

FTP is not that important as they can VNC into there PC's and get access to this drive anyways.

Everything in our office gets backed up nightly and will soon be backed up off site aswell.

They had a NAS drive before but it kept falling over and stopped responding alot so i was forever rebooting it.. So now they want me to get a good one (told them before about cheapos lol) and make sure its stable to work from.

I've also told them to put a budget for a pc and i will turn it into a server just for them but they dont want that and at the end of the day, they have the last say

[scook94]

What kind of H/W are you using for your servers? How big is the infrastructure? How much storage do you require and will it need to be scalable?

Something like this is probably overkill and beyond what you need but something like this may suit your needs?