FreeNAS setup for a small business

[heimos]

Hello,

I have been using FreeNAS for my home setup for some time now (Plex, uTorrent). Now I am trying to setup a FreeNAS server for a small media company. There are about 20 to 30 clients with about 5 to 10 accessing the NAS at any given point. I would like to setup a FreeNAS server with a redundant server as a back up using RSYNC. I want to know if going with Dell PowerEdge servers would be a wise decision. We are planning on using WD Red NAS drives. My proposed solution would be to use:

Dell PowerEdge R320 with 16 GB of ECC memory, Intel Xeon E5-2403 v2 and either 4TB or 8TB WD Red NAS Drives. We would most likely go with RAID 5 setup.

My questions are:
- would R320 suffice as a FreeNAS host based on the requirements listed?
- would going with WD Red NAS drives be a problem if they are more that 4 TB?
- can you recommend a different solution besides RSYNC that I could use for a redundant storage copy? Back up host will have similar hardware specifications and will be connected via a gigabit network.

Thanks in advance

 

[nojohnny101]

- would R320 suffice as a FreeNAS host based on the requirements listed?

I'll leave that to someone else.

- would going with WD Red NAS drives be a problem if they are more that 4 TB?

No. Why do you ask this, I don't understand, am I missing something?

- can you recommend a different solution besides RSYNC that I could use for a redundant storage copy? Back up host will have similar hardware specifications and will be connected via a gigabit network.

Do you have reservations about RSYNC? I personally don't have experience with it but I know it is used with great success by many members on here. Ideally, if your PULL machine for backup was ZFS, you could just use replication and that might be a bit better. What are the specs of the PULL machine and what is it running?

Some additional thoughts:
- ZFS/FreeNAS does not use "RAIDX" terminology. I'm surprised you even typed that if you have been using FreeNAS personally for some time. Have you read through the ZFS abbreviations and terms? That will get you up to date on proper terms to use so we know exactly what you are talking about.
- I'm assuming here, but by RAID5 do you mean RAIDZ1? If so, that is NOT recommended because increased chances of a second drive failing during the resilvering process. poof, data gone. However, if you do know what you are doing, have appropriate backup solutions (on and off-site), and can deal with downtime and understand the risks, then you could use multiple raidz1 vdevs because I suspect you will need the speed.
- Going off of that point, what consideration have you given to the type of redundancy level you want? How critical is downtime and such? Since you have a good amount of users accessing the server at any given time, I would think either multiple raidz1 (with the caveats stated above), raidz2 or possibly mirror vdevs is what you want. You are going to have to make sure you have the proper IOPS to serve all your users, but then again, this is going to be dependent on how you users are accessing (see below).
- In order for additional recommendations and sanity checks on your hardware, you need to provide more information about the usage case, like:
- How much storage are you starting out with? How fast are storage needs projected to grow?
- Are people going to be mostly archiving files, r/w, or just reading?
- What type of environment do you have (Windows, Mac, Linux, mixed)? Have you determined what type of shares you're going to use?
- Are you going to be doing any virtualization on this box or strictly file serving?
- You have considered a UPS correct?

 

[Stux]

What speeds are you hoping to get from then NAS? Just gigabit? Shared To all clients? Ie 100MB/s or so.

Media businesses and a gigabit server is normally a red flag to me.

If 10 users are writing at once you're only going to get 10MB/s each.

Whereas if the server was on 10gbe to a gigabit switch with a 10gbe uplink you could saturate every user, in theory.

But the requirements for a 10gbe server are significantly higher than a gigabit server.

 

[anodos]

Give more info about workload on server. How are you sharing files?

As far as xeon processors go, the e5-2304 is pretty terrible. If you're serving samba shares, I'd go with something like the e5-1620 or e5-1650 (way overkill). 16GB RAM may not be enough. RAIDZ1 is not advised.

Honestly, It sounds like you are somewhat new to this. You probably need to do more research before deploying in production at a business. You don't want to land in a position where you're negatively affecting someone else's job / income because you haven't done your homework.