Q: Office RAID or NAS solution
-
May 1, 2014 7:59 AMby Pmgrnvl,HelpfulA Thunderbolt RAID should fly. Surprised by your issue here.
Other World Computing makes a number of RAID solutions, and we've had good luck with them. Although many are not yet Thunderbolt, we have deployed many using Firewire 800 to a similar Mac mini server and served files to as many as 50 users without a hitch in a prepress environment. OWC now has several solutions using Thunderbolt, however. I would investigate. The i7 mini server, connected to a suitable external drive via Thunderbolt (or even FireWire 800) should fly unless you are doing video editing or something.
One other thought: Sometimes simple is best. You may find a few of the OWC Elite Pro Dual Thunderbolts, for example, would be the way to go. For example, you can set these up to mirror, and put in three of the 8TB units (4+4 mirrored, so 4TB per unit), for a total of 12TB mirrored space for a bit over $2000. This would necessitate three share points, but maybe that would be OK: current work, archive files, whatever. Then, if you did have a failure, you wouldn't be totally down.
LaCie also makes some RAID solutions that have worked well for me. I haven't worked with Promise in years, and I'm not knocking them -- should be great stuff! Rather, just pointing out some other options. Remember, your network may be the slowest part of things (especially if you are on WiFi) so keep in mind, too, that FireWire 800 might do almost as well as Thunderbolt in real-world use, for a lot less money.
Good luck.
-
May 6, 2014 1:25 AMby rebelscum75,Hi PM, thanks for your reply, I wasn't aware of Other World Computing I will look them up.
As it happens I just ordered a Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt 2 as the new 'live' server, with the original Promise drive acting as a failover, so using Carbon Copy Cloner or something similar to replicate the server data to (in theory) never need to lose a day while one of the RAIDs is being repaired.
Its early days but the Thunderbolt 2 is noticeably faster browsing around - as it should be!
-
May 13, 2014 12:27 PMby mhadjar,I would stay away from NAS personally. If you don't like Promise stuff, try Drobo.
They offer the B800i for much cheaper, or the B1200 for probably a similar price to the Promise. Its BYOD (bring your own drives).
Both connect to the Mac via iSCSI. If you want more information, I can help you with setting this up.
The B800i is an 8 bay, supports 1 or 2 disk redundancy.
The B1200 is a 12 bay, supports 1 or 2 disk redundancy. It also has swapable power supply unit.
drobo.com for more information on the two units.
-
May 15, 2014 4:49 AMby rebelscum75,Thanks everyone for your advice, as it stands we now have 2 Promise Pegasus RAID towers, the new Thunderbolt 2 is a noticeable improvement speed-wise on the previous one. The two Pegasus drives & the Mac mini server are connected to each other via thunderbolt cable 'daisy-chained'.
Rsync shell script clones the data to the old drive so if the new one goes out of action for a day for whatever reason we just switch over to the 'failover' drive with minimal downtime.
