PHOTOGABBLE // BLOG POST

So you want to build a NAS server?

June 13th, 2007

So you work for a successful company which has managed to as a result of its success managed to accumulate terrabites of data critical to the on going expansion of your business. However due to the extremely quick way in which your company has grown, all your data is spread over numerous hard disks connected to dozens of desktops with no continuous backup and no easy way of sharing data securely between employees. Now that things have settled down, you want to ensure the ongoing success of the company which is directly tied in with the data you keep by securely and safely storing it within a centralised system: network attached storage.

You could lash out ten grand and have the job done, but what if you don’t have such a large amount of money to spare. The next available option is to build your own NAS server, and it is pretty fortunate that such a task isn’t extremely difficult and can be a lot cheaper than purchasing similar things elsewhere.

First things first if your going to build your own NAS server is you have to consider the amount of space your going to need, for ultimate redundancy I would recommend going for a RAID-5 setup, however a good quality raid controller card will set you back a good £200 and that’s before you even begin to purchase the multiple hard disks which will vary in cost depending on the overall size of the storage you require and the more disks you need the bigger the case you need to contain them, and the more efficient cooling and PSU you shall have to purchase just to keep them in good health. If you haven’t already, set aside a room in your office, it need not be huge just big enough to store all the servers you are going to need and an air conditioning unit to de-humidify the air and keep the room temperature below 18 degrees celcius.

Second thing to consider is the access speed you need, if all your using your NAS storage for is backing up data from each desktop at the end of the night then you don’t need to be thinking of anything quicker than a gigabit lan setup. However if your business is video editing and you want each desktop to manage its projects data live from the NAS server, then your going to need to be thinking of having at least two gigabit lan connections coming from each NAS server, and a gigabit or even 2/4GB fibre lan with additional redundancy for heavy load times. Also if your wanting continual access then I would recommend limiting the amount of storage per server and spreading the load over multiple units so that you aren’t left about waiting for the server to pump out data at peak load times.

Thirdly you need to consider both damage control and contingency plans incase of massive data loss such as if your office where to burn down one night or a power cut/surge caused data corruption over several disks. To protect your company against cases such as these it is advisable to invest in tape backup solutions and making at least a weekly backup of all data to be transported off site and to a secure location. However if your dealing with terrabites of data then tape backups can become costly, so it will come to weighing up either purchasing redundant servers which you back up data to once a month and then transport off site into secure storage so if the worst was to happen you still have your companies files safely stored ready to be used or buying a tape solution; I would go with the cheapest, and if it turns out that you have terrabytes of archives but only really have a few hundred gigabytes of mission critical data then go with the tape solution. Always plan for the worst case solution, that way when/if it does happen your ready for it and can react without it effecting your business too much. In the case of power surges and power cuts, always have your servers running off of UPS which both clean the power being supplied to your servers extending their lives and protecting them against damage caused when power is suddenly lost. In an ideal world each and every desktop in your office would be running off of a UPS so during a powercut absolutely no data is lost/corrupted and people can shut down their machines and wait out the powercut without fearing the extent of what they might have lost.

Lastly I would also recommend that if your NAS servers are mission critical, that you don’t skimp on high end components simply based upon cost. Because if you loose 300GB of important video archive because a budget RAID card couldn’t take the continual load then you only have your tight fisted-ness to blame. Also the more data you want to store, the more costly it is going to be to store it. That’s just basic logic, it might be best for you to build your own NAS server setup if you have tallented ICT staff working for you. Or it might be more benificial to custom order a NAS server array from people such as Excel Meridian Data, inc.

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Tags: build, how, how-to, NAS, network, server, storage