Design Studio Machine Build

[tsegreto]

My friend owns a design studio and does a lot of custom fabrication. He has 2 CNC Machines, 2 laser cutters/engravers, UV printer, etc. He uses Windows 7 on his computer with all this software loaded on and every other day he is having a driver compatibility issue which is costing him a decent amount of money in downtime.

 

He wants to build a NAS, as everything he has is stores on regular HDDs and 2.5" external  hard drives (really not cost efficient or optimal).

 

What is the best way to handle this problem? I was thinking about building a Xeon NAS with multiple Windows VMs, each VM to communicate with each machine, along with a RAID 6/10 NAS.

[dalekphalm]

On 28/10/2017 at 4:47 PM, tsegreto said:

My friend owns a design studio and does a lot of custom fabrication. He has 2 CNC Machines, 2 laser cutters/engravers, UV printer, etc. He uses Windows 7 on his computer with all this software loaded on and every other day he is having a driver compatibility issue which is costing him a decent amount of money in downtime.

 

He wants to build a NAS, as everything he has is stores on regular HDDs and 2.5" external  hard drives (really not cost efficient or optimal).

 

What is the best way to handle this problem? I was thinking about building a Xeon NAS with multiple Windows VMs, each VM to communicate with each machine, along with a RAID 6/10 NAS.

If downtime is costing him money, I would advise against doing a custom build.

 

This is a business. Lost time = lost money. I would suggest either buying a proper file server w/ support (including next day parts delivery, etc), or buying a pre-built NAS appliance from QNAP or Synology, etc.

 

Think about if the motherboard dies. Okay well now you've got to RMA the motherboard, potentially wait weeks for a replacement, and now his system has been down for weeks.

 

If you get something from HPE or Dell, they'll send the motherboard using priority overnight shipping, and have a tech on-site to install it.

 

My next question is: Why do you need multiple VM's on the "NAS"? For what purpose? Why would you need a VM to "communicate" with each machine. What machine are you talking about? A CNC machine or a workstation?