Help! Advice on building a server.

[ekyona]

Hello! I’m new to building a server. 
i am building one for our small business construction company.

 

So what we want is have everyone who works in the house have their own partition they can save into and work from. But have some partition they share with each other. I’m familiar with making shareable folders. 
 

Hardware wise what cpu do I need and should I use ecc memory? 
 

we have about 6 users. 
 

what OS should I use. Truenas or unraid? 
 

What I want is it just aNAS or server.

 

please I need advice

[LIGISTX]

44 minutes ago, ekyona said:

Hello! I’m new to building a server. 
i am building one for our small business construction company.

 

So what we want is have everyone who works in the house have their own partition they can save into and work from. But have some partition they share with each other. I’m familiar with making shareable folders. 
 

Hardware wise what cpu do I need and should I use ecc memory? 
 

we have about 6 users. 
 

what OS should I use. Truenas or unraid? 
 

What I want is it just aNAS or server.

 

please I need advice

If you have never rolled out a NAS before, I would advise against setting up your first one for your company. You have to remember, suddenly, all responsibility for all of this data is now on your shoulders… someone gets locked out, someone deletes a file and wants it recovered, hardware or software issues or failures, it’s all on you. 

I would go with truenas, but I would first set one up at home, and run it for at least 6 months before you ever try and deploy something for the company. Honestly, 6 months is no where near long enough to really learn it, but it’ll at least let you get the basics down enough to implement it for people besides yourself. 

[Bersella AI]

Maybe a pre-built NAS would be better for you. It can be easily coped with, and you can ask the service team from Synology, or QNAP, etc. about any question at any time. In Synology DSM, each user will have an isolated workplace or storage, and share files using Synology Drive; all needed are setting up users, folders to be shared, and permissions for access.

[apharma]

An alternative is also to use a cloud based solution for data storage and sharing, as LIGISTX said, you become responsible if something goes wrong so if you haven't set one up before you're starting on shaky ground already.

The business I work for used dropbox for storing and managing files, was free but there's paid versions that offer more functionality and would suit your business need without having to worry about backing up data etc. Paid versions seem worse value than MS Office for small business though unless you use a family plan for 6 people at £14/month.

You can use something like MS accounts or another managed business software, I know a lot of people complain about things with Teams but Sharepoint works great for storing and sharing files while giving you the ability to manage everyone relatively easily and access rights. Prices start at £4.90/user (£58.80 billed annually) in the UK which would be great for a small business especially not having to worry about backups. You also get Office apps as a bonus.

As part of the cost/benefit you should know an off the shelf 2-4 bay NAS will cost £180-£300 WITHOUT hard drives or offsite back up, 2 cheap 1TB NAS drives will be about £50 each so you're getting to ~£280 starting price and again, no offsite backup which you need for business critical data. Suddenly that Dropbox family plan at £168/year is looking like a good plan for 2 years while you build up more knowledge and experience about what you want as a longer lasting solution.

All prices are in GBP but usually it's a straight conversion to USD due to tax and exchange rates.

[MG2R]

If it MUST be on-prem, buy yourself a Synology box and then buy yourself some backup solution. 
 

In your case I’d go for managed cloud storage. Your core business is not running servers. Why waste your valuable time doing it? Pay someone to do it twice as fast, twice as good at half the cost. 
 

oh btw. Get backups. Then backup your backups. Sprinkle some more backups on top. Backups! 

[HomeLabAddict]

On 7/18/2023 at 9:51 PM, LIGISTX said:

 I would go with truenas, but I would first set one up at home, and run it for at least 6 months before you ever try and deploy something for the company. Honestly, 6 months is no where near long enough to really learn it, but it’ll at least let you get the basics down enough to implement it for people besides yourself. 

lol I agree with this, about a year after running my homelab there's no way I would have been comfortable with the amount of experience it takes to have all of that responsibility all of a sudden.

 

On 7/21/2023 at 6:22 AM, MG2R said:

In your case I’d go for managed cloud storage. Your core business is not running servers. Why waste your valuable time doing it? Pay someone to do it twice as fast, twice as good at half the cost. 
 

oh btw. Get backups. Then backup your backups. Sprinkle some more backups on top. Backups! 

This right here is the way to go, especially for a smaller team, hell even a midsized team