Building a storage solution for a business is incredibly important. It needs to be more than just dragging and dropping files to a random file server, since these are files that the company needs to perform business, and in many cases sensitive client information is involved as well. It is also important to have a solution that works in conjunction with the whole business, as opposed to have 10 different independent solutions that cost significantly more and will eat up a large portion of IT’s time. This means that building a solution for the whole company makes the most sense rather than just letting departments handle it on a whim.
So how do we build that solution? Ideally at the core should be a SAN system such as a Dell Equallogic or Compellent, though converting a server to into a storage platform can work well. RAID should be in place, without question, and if a secondary backup solution can be built for the SAN, all the better – no matter how powerful the SAN might be, it is never a good idea to have all of your eggs in a single basket as a single point of failure. Dell produces multiple SAN solutions as well as server solutions that we can recommend based on your needs.
At a software level, there are a lot of additional factors to consider. Using VMWare to handle your storage gives you a lot of options, but the licensing costs might be something to consider. On the other side of the spectrum using a tool like FreeNAS will give you the ability to build that storage server with no additional licensing costs, but without the support that using a solution like VMWare provides from the manufacturer. Nexenta offers a community-edition as well as an enterprise edition, providing a good growth plan if you decide to start with the free version and eventually feel that you have grown to a point where paid support is simply a must. Many of the paid software solutions also have data deduplication solutions in place to save on disk space, saving costs in a completely different manner by reducing the amount of disk space needed. Fortunately many of the bigger hardware manufacturers, such as Dell, have relationships in place with the software vendors like Nexenta to come pre-shipped with the software in place, so at least one step can be handled for you. Determining the right solution will depend on what you need and expect from said manufacturer if you have a problem.
Getting back to RAID, there are many, many different variations of RAID that you might want to consider implementing. All variants of RAID will provide some level of redundancy and protection from a system failure, with the exception of RAID 0 which exists exclusively for boosting system performance. RAID 1, the traditional mirroring solution, is pretty good for an application server, but for a storage system it is a really good idea to look at one of the more redundant and efficient solutions, like RAID 6 or RAID 10. Performance-wise RAID 10 is the ideal solution, but it isn’t very efficient so if large amounts of data are being stored then RAID 6 (or even RAID 5) is the better solution.
So at this point you have a general idea of what to look at with some basic configuration options as well as the different software options that can actually power the SAN, or server in smaller configurations. From here, the next consideration will be what type of hard drives should actually store your data. SATA are the least costly with the largest potential storage, but they also take the longest to transfer data, and will act as a bottleneck transferring data. SSD drives are the fastest drives available, though they typically come in smaller sizes and are the most costly. SAS drives act as a sort of happy medium between the two, balancing speed, size, and performance between SSD and SATA. Once again, this will vary on your specific needs so it is hard to make a recommendation as to what is the best solution without having a conversation regarding your needs.
If you need some help gauging the right solution for a storage solution for your company, we are here to help. Whether you are looking to build a smaller storage server with one of our dedicated private servers, or you are looking to colocate a SAN in our data center, we can work with you to find the best solution for your business. We can even procure a SAN solution from Dell with very competitive pricing, thanks to our preferred partnership with Dell. To learn more about Vault Networks and how we can procure hardware to power your storage, reach out to us by calling (305) 735-8098 option 2 or by emailing sales@vaultnetworks.com.
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