Need help with self hosted cloud storage solution

[youri377]

Hi all,

 

My boss wants to move away from our old local file server to a cloud solution so he's asked me (the only somewhat tech savy guy there) to find a solution, he preferably wants something with a one time investment and no monthly cost whatsoever. i've been looking into self hosted cloud solutions but since i don't really have any experience with servers/hosting (except a minecraft server for 3 friends lol) i'm having a hard time understanding the options out there and what exacly is required for something like this. 

 

what i'm trying to achieve is something that works exactly like a onedrive, dropbox, etc. shared folders with certain restrictions for every user that sync automatically over the internet (so people could work out of the office) a web interface would be very nice but isn't strictly required.

 

Could anyone help me in the right direction with this?

[unijab]

Why not plain old cifs/samba?

[Windows7ge]

Right now I can tell you if the company stores sizable data you'd have to host your own private server (off-site) or else you can't avoid a regular monthly/quarterly/yearly payment. That's how cloud hosting works.

[youri377]

8 minutes ago, unijab said:

Why not plain old cifs/samba?

please explain, i have no idea what cifs or samba is

[youri377]

7 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Right now I can tell you if the company stores sizable data you'd have to host your own private server (off-site) or else you can't avoid a regular monthly/quarterly/yearly payment. That's how cloud hosting works.

1 terabyte of storage would be plenty, but easy expandability (pop in another hard drive, assign it and done) would be nice

[RobbinM]

Consider FreeNAS then, it has Plugins to provide everything you need.

It will have a steep (steap? spelling?) learning curve though, lots of videos on the tubes to check out.

[Windows7ge]

2 minutes ago, youri377 said:

1 terabyte of storage would be plenty, but easy expandability (pop in another hard drive, assign it and done) would be nice

Is he looking to have this hosted by a 3rd party like Google or hosted by you but off-site?

 

1TB from Google would result in a monthly payment.

[youri377]

1 minute ago, Windows7ge said:

Is he looking to have this hosted by a 3rd party like Google or hosted by you but off-site?

 

1TB from Google would result in a monthly payment.

no, hosted by ourself, not even off-site. just a pc in a closet running 24/7. in an ideal situation we recycle the current local server for this but like i said a one time investment is not an issue for us, but he wants to keep montly costs as low as possible

[Windows7ge]

3 minutes ago, RobbinM said:

Consider FreeNAS then, it has Plugins to provide everything you need.

It will have a steep (steap? spelling?) learning curve though, lots of videos on the tubes to check out.

Unfortunately at current FreeNAS doesn't have easy expandability. The pool has to be destroyed and rebuilt or an entire dataset has to be connected to the existing pool.

 

I'd probably recommend either A. Windows Server & use storage spaces. Adding disks is only a couple quick step process, or B. Hardware RAID controller (not w/ FreeNAS) which should also be relatively simple to add storage to.

[Windows7ge]

2 minutes ago, youri377 said:

no, hosted by ourself, not even off-site. just a pc in a closet running 24/7. in an ideal situation we recycle the current local server for this but like i said a one time investment is not an issue for us, but he wants to keep montly costs as low as possible

On-site isn't cloud storage so you confused me there. Your best option for a business would be either Dell or HPE. If something goes wrong with it they can send people out to get it up and running again. Also the insurance if the hardware quits.

 

You can get one without an OS so if you want say CentOS or Redhat you can install that yourself.

[unijab]

28 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

The pool has to be destroyed and rebuilt or an entire dataset has to be connected to the existing pool.

 

That is very misleading.

 

You can easily grow a pool by adding more vdevs. The data does not redistribute over between all the available vdevs in a pool, but you can easily grow the space available.

[youri377]

thanks for your replies guys, i've been quickly looking into freenas with a owncloud plugin and it looks pretty simple to set-up. think i'm going to do a test setup at home and see how i like it.

[Windows7ge]

5 minutes ago, unijab said:

 

That is very misleading.

 

You can easily grow a pool by adding more vdevs. The data does not redistribute over between all the available vdevs in a pool, but you can easily grow the space available.

In all honesty there was a lapse in my memory. I meant vdev but my point remains. AFAIK if you have (let's say) a RAID5 you can't just add +1 disk. You'd have to add an additional RAID5. That's not convenient and is long term quite limiting.

[Jarsky]

3 hours ago, youri377 said:

he preferably wants something with a one time investment and no monthly cost whatsoever.

 

Quote

i've been looking into self hosted cloud solutions

 

This confused me...'cloud solution' is a buzz word that essentially means remote infrastructure that you buy as a service

 

But if you want something simple, why not go with a Synology device?

Easy to manage and integrate into any existing infrastructure (like AD)

Synology DSM also gives you cloud like features like file sharing, syncing changes, work on shared documents simultaenously, sharing & management interfaces, internet sharing with links, etc....

 

 

[unijab]

2 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

In all honesty there was a lapse in my memory. I meant vdev but my point remains. AFAIK if you have (let's say) a RAID5 you can't just add +1 disk. You'd have to add an additional RAID5. That's not convenient and is long term quite limiting.

 

Yes you cant change the vdev after you have created it.

But you can easily expand a pool by adding more vdevs into the pool.

 

[Windows7ge]

21 minutes ago, unijab said:

 

Yes you cant change the vdev after you have created it.

But you can easily expand a pool by adding more vdevs into the pool.

 

Personally I don't like that method of storage expansion because it's not user friendly. If you don't entirely know what you're doing you'll be paying for it down the road when you have too many physical disks and all of a sudden you have to replace all of them at once due to either running out of bays or you decide you want denser disks.

 

One single vdev is much simpler and easy to manage long term but single disks can't be added to it which goes against what OP wants. Adding vdevs although not particularly hard does require an understanding of how the pools are setup and how to create, assign, and expand. If OP wants to add 1 disk at a time FreeNAS (at current) won't work.

 

I'm not anti-FreeNAS I've been using it myself for over 2 years but like RobbinM said it comes with a learning curve which isn't good for an active business with someone new to the OS.

[unijab]

1 hour ago, Windows7ge said:

down the road when you have too many physical disks

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

AFAIK if you have (let's say) a RAID5 you can't just add +1 disk.

 

 

Your own example was adding disks.. and now adding disks is not an option?

[RobbinM]

If you like Synology and still like to re-use hardware, have a look at Xpenology (Synology OS on your own hardware). Haven't tried it yet (I'm running FreeNAS) but it looks nice too.

[Jarsky]

23 minutes ago, unijab said:

Your own example was adding disks.. and now adding disks is not an option?

 

You can add disks, but not in the same way as traditional raids and something like btrfs. 

in FreeNAS you have datasets, vdevs & zpools (pools). datasets is your filesystem, this sits on top of your pool. Your pool is made up from 1 or more vdev's which is a collection of your physical disks. Say you have a 3 disk RAIDZ1(RAID5), then that's 3 disks in your pool. If you wanted to add more disks, you cant just add one to your vdev. You need to add 3, create another RAIDZ1 vdev, then add that to your pool- so you now have vdev1 & vdev2 which are both RAIDZ1's.

 

Unlike traditional arrays, as theyre seperate vdevs the data isn't redistributed amongst the new drives, it means all the data that currently exists on vdev1, only exists on there, and not on vdev2. 

 

FreeNAS looks at how much space is available on each vdev to know where to write too, so as vdev2 has the most free space it will write there, and only once the vdev's even out it will start writing across them all. 

 

With FreeNAS whenever you need to increase the size of a pool, its recommended you create a new one and migrate the data.

You can also pull a disk and replace it with a larger one, then once the recalculations have finished and the pool is healthy again you move onto the next, once all done then you expand your dataset. If you have a RAIDZ-1 though you put your data at risk as you also can't reform zfs and move from RAIDZ-1 to RAIDZ-2, RAIDZ-3, etc...to add extra reliability for the rebuild process. 

 

Getting into all the technicalities of something like freenas, is why I recommended the Synology

Robustness and features but easy to manage and comes with vendor support. 

[Bajantechnician]

5 hours ago, youri377 said:

thanks for your replies guys, i've been quickly looking into freenas with a owncloud plugin and it looks pretty simple to set-up. think i'm going to do a test setup at home and see how i like it.

Why not a off the shelf nas like a Synology?

[Windows7ge]

2 hours ago, unijab said:

Your own example was adding disks.. and now adding disks is not an option?

It's dependent on the pools configuration. If the pool is just one drive then adding additional single drive vdevs can work.

If I made a four drive RAID5 (that's just an example) and I just wanted to add 1 drive. That won't work. I'd have to create an entire additional pool consisting of a similar or identical configuration in order to add the vdev to expand that pools storage. That's not ideal. At least not for OP.

 

Do correct me if my understanding is wrong.

[leadeater]

16 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

Right now I can tell you if the company stores sizable data you'd have to host your own private server (off-site) or else you can't avoid a regular monthly/quarterly/yearly payment. That's how cloud hosting works.

Even then you'd be paying a monthly hosting fee, there is no way to get around having to pay money on a regular basis when talking external hosting or the cloud. The only mitigation to that is prepaying for a year, every year essentially making it a capital expenditure rather than operational.

[Windows7ge]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Even then you'd be paying a monthly hosting fee, there is no way to get around having to pay money on a regular basis when talking external hosting or the cloud. The only mitigation to that is prepaying for a year, every year essentially making it a capital expenditure rather than operational.

I should have phrased that post better. When I said "off-site" I was more referring to a "remote-site". One owned and currently operated by them (Obviously I don't know if they have one). That would enable them to tap off their ISP there and run the server from that site effectively being a "cloud" (I would just call it off-site storage, remote-storage, off-campus storage, whatever makes sense to you) at no long term additional cost. Besides the electric bill.

[Mikensan]

I believe google offers business accounts for $5/m per person, which allows you access to their gsuite. You could use them as your mail provider, so still person@company.com but backed by google - just have to update your mx records. Not sure who your mail provider is now, but consolidating "cloud" storage + business email for $5/m per person is a pretty good deal. Also you get the amazing spam filtering done by google.

 

I would price your storage solution and compare it to the monthly cost over 5 years (somewhat average life of IT equipment). I would suggest as another pointed out, Synology or QNAP and just install the Nextcloud plugin. I'd avoid DIY unless you want to have to support this thing going forward, I'd rather just call a vendor for support.

[Bajantechnician]

2 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

I should have phrased that post better. When I said "off-site" I was more referring to a "remote-site". One owned and currently operated by them (Obviously I don't know if they have one). That would enable them to tap off their ISP there and run the server from that site effectively being a "cloud" (I would just call it off-site storage, remote-storage, off-campus storage, whatever makes sense to you) at no long term additional cost. Besides the electric bill.

yeah, just get a synology or a qnap man. you can upgrade storage and upload through a link (on the synology as far as i know, had no experience on qnap)