Classroom: NAS vs SERVER

[OMGitsGhost]

My schools web design class had a server, but a HDD failed killing the entire data. I'm helping my teacher out by asking for your guys ideas. The school doesn't want us to get a new server, but we can get a NAS. Will a WD NAS work well with about 30 user using at the same time? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Depends of whats there doing. If your copying small files its more than enough, if your running a larege data base or video editing you need something 

 

TLDR, yes its fine.

[OMGitsGhost]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Depends of whats there doing. If your copying small files its more than enough, if your running a larege data base or video editing you need something 

 

TLDR, yes its fine.

We use it to have all the students files on there instead on the PCs they use. Mostly only HTML, CSS, and image files. Another class will use it for Greenfoot and audio. 

[Guest acdcman200]

1 hour ago, OMGitsGhost said:

We use it to have all the students files on there instead on the PCs they use. Mostly only HTML, CSS, and image files. Another class will use it for Greenfoot and audio. 

It will be fine, make sure to have the raid set up in a redundancy and use WD RED drives for 24/7 operation. STAY AWAY FROM SEGATE. I have had so many Segate drives fail. (enterprise rated ones as well) Stick with WD RED. There used in servers and NAS for a reason.

[ShadowCaptain]

12 minutes ago, OMGitsGhost said:

My schools web design class had a server, but a HDD failed killing the entire data. I'm helping my teacher out by asking for your guys ideas. The school doesn't want us to get a new server, but we can get a NAS. Will a WD NAS work well with about 30 user using at the same time? 

 

No offence, but shouldnt your schools IT department be sorting this? and they should be running redundancy like RAID on their server so that if a drive fails it would still be safe

 

Why not replace the drives in the server?

A chepo off the shelf NAS is not equipped for 30 people accessing it at once, it will be slow, and you will need a model with at least 2 drives so you can use RAID 1

[OMGitsGhost]

7 minutes ago, ShadowCaptain said:

 

No offence, but shouldnt your schools IT department be sorting this? and they should be running redundancy like RAID on their server so that if a drive fails it would still be safe

 

Why not replace the drives in the server?

A chepo off the shelf NAS is not equipped for 30 people accessing it at once, it will be slow, and you will need a model with at least 2 drives so you can use RAID 1

School doesnt want to get another server so we are trying new idea to work around on what they told us.

[ShadowCaptain]

Just now, OMGitsGhost said:

School doesnt want to get another server so we are trying new idea to work around on what they told us.

Just put new hard drives in the old server

[OMGitsGhost]

Just now, ShadowCaptain said:

Just put new hard drives in the old server

They don't want gives us the old server, for all we know they trashed it already. 

 

[OMGitsGhost]

13 minutes ago, acdcman200 said:

It will be fine, make sure to have the raid set up in a redundancy and use WD RED drives for 24/7 operation. STAY AWAY FROM SEGATE. I have had so many Segate drives fail. (enterprise rated ones as well) Stick with WD RED. There used in servers and NAS for a reason.

Yea we are getting WD red HDDs and a redundant PSU. 

[ShadowCaptain]

Just now, OMGitsGhost said:

They don't want gives us the old server, for all we know they trashed it already. 

 

Is there a budget?

 

Could easily build a small PC with some hard drives to act as a new server

[OMGitsGhost]

Just now, ShadowCaptain said:

Is there a budget?

 

Could easily build a small PC with some hard drives to act as a new server

The only IT guy thats helping us suggested we use a NAS, but in this case i'd rather have a small PC built. So go for something around $1000 

[maxtch]

Using a NAS here would actually be ill-suited as a full-fledge server can support not only students uploading assignments on there, but also allow actual server-side programming should someone want to teach, or just do that (it is almost trivial to set up a complete LAMP stack there so if anyone want they can create web pages with PHP in it they can) but with NAS you are likely to be restricted to static pages.

 

I would suggest keep using a full-fledge server (if you can keep the old hardware just keep using it, if not you can build one from second-hand server-grade components. Socket 775 and 771 based server gear are fairly cheap now if bought used) and put some redundancy in there to defend against a future hardware failure. You are going to have up to 40 people hitting the server at the same time (I am taking safety margin into account here) so a three-drive RAID-5 with some SSD cache (60GB would be more than enough) would be nice.

[OMGitsGhost]

2 minutes ago, maxtch said:

Using a NAS here would actually be ill-suited as a full-fledge server can support not only students uploading assignments on there, but also allow actual server-side programming should someone want to teach, or just do that (it is almost trivial to set up a complete LAMP stack there so if anyone want they can create web pages with PHP in it they can) but with NAS you are likely to be restricted to static pages.

 

I would suggest keep using a full-fledge server (if you can keep the old hardware just keep using it, if not you can build one from second-hand server-grade components. Socket 775 and 771 based server gear are fairly cheap now if bought used) and put some redundancy in there to defend against a future hardware failure. You are going to have up to 40 people hitting the server at the same time (I am taking safety margin into account here) so a three-drive RAID-5 with some SSD cache (60GB would be more than enough) would be nice.

Thanks I'll talk with teacher about this. The School allows us only to order off certain sites so can we try to get second hand parts on Tiger Direct or someone of the sort. 

[maxtch]

12 minutes ago, OMGitsGhost said:

Thanks I'll talk with teacher about this. The School allows us only to order off certain sites so can we try to get second hand parts on Tiger Direct or someone of the sort. 

Here are three of my recommendations:

• Used parts rig:
  • CPU: Intel Xeon X3330 (2.66GHz quad core LGA775)
  • MoBo: Asus P5BV-C
  • RAM: 4x 2GB DDR2-667 unbuffered ECC
  • HDD: 3x WD Red 3TB (buy new)
  • SSD: Kingston SSDNow V300 60GB (buy new)
  • RAID controller: IBM ServerRAID M5015 or M5110 (get the BBU, and flash back to LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i or 9265-8i firmware if possible)
  • Chassis & PSU: any ATX chassis & 300W PSU will work
• Dual processor used parts rig:
  • CPU: 2x Intel Xeon X5460 (3.16GHz quad core LGA771)
  • MoBo: Tyan S5376G2NR
  • RAM: 6x 4GB DDR2-667 unbuffered ECC (somehow 4GB sticks can be cheaper than 2GB ones - if you go this route make sure you fill all slots with 4GB sticks)
  • HDD: 3x WD Red 3TB (buy new)
  • SSD: Kingston SSDNow V300 60GB (buy new)
  • RAID controller: IBM ServerRAID M5015 or M5110 (get the BBU, and flash back to LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i or 9265-8i firmware if possible)
  • Chassis & PSU: any EATX chassis & 500W PSU will work
• Mostly new rig:
  • CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 (3.4GHz quad core LGA1150 with hyperthreading, You can go Skylake if you want but that may carry a price premium for being brand new)
  • MoBo: Supermicro X10SLL-F
  • RAM: 4x 8GB DDR3-1600 Registered ECC
  • HDD: 3x WD Red 3TB
  • SSD: Kingston SSDNow V300 60GB
  • RAID controller: IBM ServerRAID M5015 or M5110 (buy used, get the BBU, and flash back to LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i or 9265-8i firmware if possible)
  • Chassis & PSU: any ATX chassis & 300W PSU will work, buy used

If you want to, you can even virtualize this (especially the DP used parts rig with 24GB RAM or mostly new rig with 32GB RAM) and give every student a dedicated virtual server so students can set up their own server environment (the common base system is a clean LAMP stack, if the student want to actually put the MySQL database to use they will want to initialise it with their own database structure)

[OMGitsGhost]

3 minutes ago, maxtch said:

Here are three of my recommendations:

• Used parts rig:
  • CPU: Intel Xeon X3330 (2.66GHz quad core LGA775)
  • MoBo: Asus P5BV-C
  • RAM: 4x 2GB DDR2-667 unbuffered ECC
  • HDD: 3x WD Red 3TB (buy new)
  • SSD: Kingston SSDNow V300 60GB (buy new)
  • RAID controller: IBM ServerRAID M5015 or M5110 (get the BBU, and flash back to LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i or 9265-8i firmware if possible)
  • Chassis & PSU: any ATX chassis & 300W PSU will work
• Dual processor used parts rig:
  • CPU: 2x Intel Xeon X5460 (3.16GHz quad core LGA771)
  • MoBo: Tyan S5376G2NR
  • RAM: 6x 4GB DDR2-667 unbuffered ECC (somehow 4GB sticks can be cheaper than 2GB ones - if you go this route make sure you fill all slots with 4GB sticks)
  • HDD: 3x WD Red 3TB (buy new)
  • SSD: Kingston SSDNow V300 60GB (buy new)
  • RAID controller: IBM ServerRAID M5015 or M5110 (get the BBU, and flash back to LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i or 9265-8i firmware if possible)
  • Chassis & PSU: any EATX chassis & 500W PSU will work
• Mostly new rig:
  • CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 (3.4GHz quad core LGA1150 with hyperthreading, You can go Skylake if you want but that may carry a price premium for being brand new)
  • MoBo: Supermicro X10SLL-F
  • RAM: 4x 8GB DDR3-1600 Registered ECC
  • HDD: 3x WD Red 3TB
  • SSD: Kingston SSDNow V300 60GB
  • RAID controller: IBM ServerRAID M5015 or M5110 (buy used, get the BBU, and flash back to LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i or 9265-8i firmware if possible)
  • Chassis & PSU: any ATX chassis & 300W PSU will work, buy used

If you want to, you can even virtualize this (especially the DP used parts rig with 24GB RAM or mostly new rig with 32GB RAM) and give every student a dedicated virtual server so students can set up their own server environment (the common base system is a clean LAMP stack, if the student want to actually put the MySQL database to use they will want to initialise it with their own database structure)

Thanks! If anything comes up I'll message you. Once again thank you!

[maxtch]

8 hours ago, OMGitsGhost said:

Thanks! If anything comes up I'll message you. Once again thank you!

If you are using virtual machines, I recommend this VM settings: If you are not virtualizing the guest OS and Web stack can be reused.

• vCPU: 1 core
• vRAM: 1GB
• vHDD: 60GB thick provision lazy zeroed
• Guest OS: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
• Web stack: Apache 2.4, PHP 7, MariaDB 10 (standard LAMP stack with latest software)
• If virtualized, students are allowed to install any software package from Ubuntu software repository or any PPA for their projects. Students are also allowed to take the virtual machine image home for further customization, or submit an entire configured virtual machine as assignment.