ohio_grad_06
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As some of you know, I work at a helpdesk. The organization I work for has about 6-8 different divisions that effectively act as independent companies. However, everything network related resides in our IT Department.
A bit of a backstory, we inherited 2 servers from our Publishing Division, they were essentially at one point running their own psuedo IT Department. Kind of against policy, but they had the room in the back of the building and guys who could work with things enough to be dangerous, and bought a couple of servers, and were running those, and ended up a year or so ago being forced to move them to the actual IT Department.
Fast forward until today. When we got these servers, there was no backup being run on them. They have one box that is running Windows Server 2003 R2, and has a data drive of about 5TB. The other system is an HP proliant of some type of other, older(we usually stick with Dell, but they purchased this without our knowledge at the time). But the 2nd system is running Windows Server 2008, the data drive is a size of 5.35 TB.
Effectively at this point, we are using probably about 4.5TB of that space. The older server has a couple of TB left, but from what they are telling me they are going to have to add more data. For backups, until we could get something else, we got a couple of large, external hard drives, and use those to try to get a full backup every other week or so. Not ideal by any means.
Their manager talked to me today, they'd like to move to something a bit more robust, which is a great idea. The environment here is that IT has a domain set up that the whole building uses. Their deparment specifically has a smattering of Macs and PC's. I'd say about 10-15 Macs, and probably close to that number, maybe more PC's mostly with Windows 7. The Mac guys do a lot of design work, like articles, graphics etc. They produce a lot of books, tracts, magazines, etc.
According to the manager, he thinks they've got 8-12 TB, he knows enough to be dangerous on IT/Network stuff. My initial thought that I proposed to my IT director is maybe consider a couple of large NAS devices. We have some older Buffalo equipment that we use for other divisions that is set up, they work off one NAS device, which replicates to a backup each night, and puts things they delete into a trashbox folder in their user folders, which works well enough for what they do. So that thought has crossed my mind, but the Buffalo devices seem to have trouble sometimes with domain permissions etc.
We'd like though, for the 2 servers I mentioned earlier to get them onto some type of robust, enterprise grade Server/NAS and backup solution, but I'm still learning more about this area. Wanting to see what you guys all think. I've heard guys toss around the name Synology, but don't know a lot about it. What recommendations would you all make here? We do have a corporate dropbox account, but that seems like too much information to upload to the cloud.
Also, we do have most of our equipment rack mounted, so if we can get something that would be rack mounted, that would be a plus. Forgot to mention, the servers are running RAID 5, they are interested in something that does incremental backups as well for the occasional deleted file. I know the Buffalo NAS devices in the past like we use had a trashbox feature which moved a file into your trashbox folder if you deleted a file, but the idea was you could go into trashbox and pull it out again.
A bit of a backstory, we inherited 2 servers from our Publishing Division, they were essentially at one point running their own psuedo IT Department. Kind of against policy, but they had the room in the back of the building and guys who could work with things enough to be dangerous, and bought a couple of servers, and were running those, and ended up a year or so ago being forced to move them to the actual IT Department.
Fast forward until today. When we got these servers, there was no backup being run on them. They have one box that is running Windows Server 2003 R2, and has a data drive of about 5TB. The other system is an HP proliant of some type of other, older(we usually stick with Dell, but they purchased this without our knowledge at the time). But the 2nd system is running Windows Server 2008, the data drive is a size of 5.35 TB.
Effectively at this point, we are using probably about 4.5TB of that space. The older server has a couple of TB left, but from what they are telling me they are going to have to add more data. For backups, until we could get something else, we got a couple of large, external hard drives, and use those to try to get a full backup every other week or so. Not ideal by any means.
Their manager talked to me today, they'd like to move to something a bit more robust, which is a great idea. The environment here is that IT has a domain set up that the whole building uses. Their deparment specifically has a smattering of Macs and PC's. I'd say about 10-15 Macs, and probably close to that number, maybe more PC's mostly with Windows 7. The Mac guys do a lot of design work, like articles, graphics etc. They produce a lot of books, tracts, magazines, etc.
According to the manager, he thinks they've got 8-12 TB, he knows enough to be dangerous on IT/Network stuff. My initial thought that I proposed to my IT director is maybe consider a couple of large NAS devices. We have some older Buffalo equipment that we use for other divisions that is set up, they work off one NAS device, which replicates to a backup each night, and puts things they delete into a trashbox folder in their user folders, which works well enough for what they do. So that thought has crossed my mind, but the Buffalo devices seem to have trouble sometimes with domain permissions etc.
We'd like though, for the 2 servers I mentioned earlier to get them onto some type of robust, enterprise grade Server/NAS and backup solution, but I'm still learning more about this area. Wanting to see what you guys all think. I've heard guys toss around the name Synology, but don't know a lot about it. What recommendations would you all make here? We do have a corporate dropbox account, but that seems like too much information to upload to the cloud.
Also, we do have most of our equipment rack mounted, so if we can get something that would be rack mounted, that would be a plus. Forgot to mention, the servers are running RAID 5, they are interested in something that does incremental backups as well for the occasional deleted file. I know the Buffalo NAS devices in the past like we use had a trashbox feature which moved a file into your trashbox folder if you deleted a file, but the idea was you could go into trashbox and pull it out again.
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