Developing a 4K small business storage server... Need Some Advice

[LeBron James]

Hey Everybody,

 

I am currently in the process of building a 4k Video storage server for a small business that I am working with. I have a few requirements for the server setup and was wondering if any of the fine server experts on this forum would be able to provide some guidance.

 

I am looking to develop a storage server for video content that is all 4k based. This server needs to allow me to work on a Mac or pc within the file browser and be able to open files right from the drive to edit in adobe premier (I would prefer not having to drag content off in order to edit) There are going to be 2 Macs and 2 PCs (Both with their own rendering card installed that will access the data from the drives within the storage raid)

 

I need the storage to be quite expandable (36 drive potential is nice for the future)

It needs to run on our network (We have a 10Gigabit switch already and the computers are pretty much ready to go in terms of speed)

It needs to be remotely accessible (Possibly VPN Based)

 

I am unsure if I should go with FreeNas or Unraid and where to exactly start with the hardware. I think Linus developed a similar server for media storage but am unsure if he is developed a server that worked specifically as a storage server for everybody in the office to pull and edit video files. I have around a 10K budget on the project.

 

If anybody has some expert guidance or can point me in the right direction that would be super helpful. Thanks in advance!!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id really suggest for this you get a premade box from dell or synology or anouther company. If you care about a server that keeps running pay extra for a premade box. Your getting support.

 

Id get something like this, https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/RS3617RPxs

 

then when you need more storage, get their sas expantion boxes. 

[BlackHoleFox]

For what your doing, needing a lot of drives, 10 gigabit networking and remote access, the Synology boxes will do nicely. They have a built in OS that you can setup VPN servers, cloud access, etc with little trouble.

[Strikermed]

This is an interesting topic, that I have been setting up as a home user myself.  

 

IF your going in the direction of a DIY build I would suggest 2 different scenarios.  1 would be to use a Norco case and HBA cards to allow for direct connection to drive bays and utilize Freenas.  The limitation is that you can't expand on the fly unless you duplicate the array set up, and redundancy set up.  Example.  You have 5 drives, 1 is used for redundancy, thus giving you 4 drives capacity.  Well to expand that data set you would need to add 5 more drives, and use another drive for redundancy.  Leaving you with a total of 10 drives, but only leaving you with 8 drives of capacity.  The upside is that you can take advantage of drive speeds in a RAID situation.  Currently I'm direct connected to my array via 10GbE and I get in excess of 500MB/s transfers to my local machine's SSD, and that's utilizing 5 drives in a RAIDz2 (essentialy RAID 6) configuration.

 

The second option is to use the same hardware and install UNRAID.  I love it for the purpose I use it for.  Which I'll explain below.  The downside is that it's not a RAID configuration.  It spreads data over several disks and uses the parity disks to aid in redundancy.  Thus, you only get the speeds of a single disk.  You can always add SSD's to use as a cache disk, but in my opinion, this is only good if you're writing to the disks.  The advantage is that you can do a lot with it's Virtualization capabilities, and set it up as you like with all kinds of plugins and tools.  It has ransomeware protection built in.  Another disadvantage, or one that I haven't quite figured out, is that it doesn't support snapshots, which could save you if someone makes a big mistake and deletes a lot of data, which could also be useful against ransomeware.

 

Now the option I went with is to build a beefy server with UNRAID, and then operate FreeNAS and any other OS as Virtual machines (in my case Windows 10).  I also have another system set up with strictly UNRAID with 2 Parity disks.  I use the FreeNAS as a main operating drive with fast accessible data and Snapshots for daily work, and then I use the extra UNRAID system to do an onsite backup of all of FreeNAS.  This is done nightly so that any changes are essentially backed up in case FreeNAS was to go down.  This wasn't necessary my main goal with this setup, but it became a handy tool in case I ever had to maintenance my FreeNAS software or the UNRAID box it runs on.

 

Now the other nice thing about the extra UNRAID box being there to back up my FreeNAS system, is for when I want to upgrade the storage on my FreeNAS system down the road.  I can add as my drives I want, reconfigure all of FreeNAS and then spend a weekend copying all the data back to FreeNAS.  This way I don't have an array of drives that aren't configured in an efficient way.  

 

Mind you, after all this, I also have a weekly online back up that pushes all my data to a cloud based solution.  I prescribed to data protection in 3's:  A working copy, one local backup, and one remote backup.

 

To do all my backup operations I use the Windows 10 VM and syncback Pro to back up freenas to UNRAID, and then I use UNRAID to back it up to my cloud solution which Synback Pro Supports.  I set up a schedule and it does it all in the background.  I'll occasionally run the jobs manually to ensure there aren't any errors, but that's just me being anal about trusting software.  I haven't had any issues with it, and it's been up and running for about a year now.

 

If you want more info on any of this, I can provide more.  I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to make a 4K capable system for my freelance work, and down the road I hope that this system will be a whole house media server and storage medium that's remotely accessible if I want to.

 

 

As for Synology, I have a DS214 box, which holds 4 drives.  It's a good little box, and has been running over 10 years in my house.  It's got an easy to use interface, and quick set up.  I can tell you that the hardware in them aren't very beefy, and I would say it's strictly a storage device, and I wouldn't try taking advantage of additional processes on the unit.  Some offer a variety of VM/Locker type features, but I just don't think that the hardware they put in them can handle the storage access at the speeds you want and the additional features, so keep that in mind if you go the Synology Route.

 

Good luck!

[GDRRiley]

45 drives or Supermicro makes nice 36+ driver servers for under 5K before drives.

They are both better than any Synology box