Small Office Build Advice

[nschafler]

I'm looking for some advice on building a new fileserver for my small office. I have 15 concurrent users sharing about 100GiB of word documents, spreadsheets and PDF's. All users connect from windows machines over a wired network. I don't expect the amount of data being to stored to increase significantly over the next few years (I would be shocked if we add more than a gig or two a year).

I plan on rack mounting the build in my closet.

As far as budget goes, I'd like to keep it under $4000k.

Thanks in advance for any input.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Wow: $4,000. That's a lot of money for a small office file server.

We used to put Drobos in our smaller offices. They were mostly great. Except getting that data backed up to the mothership was a pain. To make backups easier and have a common, open platform, we've started deploying FreeNAS.

Here is what we've used to replace Drobo in three offices:

Supermicro SYS-5018A-TN4
Seagate 2TB 2.5-Inch Drive (ST2000LM015) (two, mirrored, data)
ADATA SP600 32GB 2.5 Inch SSD (ASP600S3-32GM-C) (two, boot, overkill)
Supermicro storage drive cage (MCP-220-00044-0N) (two)
Kingston 8GB 1600MHz DDR3L PC3-12800 ECC KVR16LSE11/8 (two)

All-in, this costs under a thousand dollars. Performance is way better than the Drobo and it fully integrates using snapshots and replication to our main FreeNAS server. It's low power so a small, 1U UPS, can run it, the network switch and the firewall for half an hour. It also doesn't produce a lot of heat so it can be wall-mounted in an office closet without worry.

The only downside is that it lacks much in the way of expansion. Given our remote offices don't store a lot of data, 2TB will keep them happy for several years.

I'm not suggesting this is the best solution but we're happy.

Cheers,
Matt