Welcome to ReadyNAS in Business!

[yoh-dah]

We’d like to welcome Drew Meyer to the ReadyNAS team. Drew joins us from NetApp, where he worked in the StoreVault Division to bring affordable business-class storage to the SMB market. Drew’s a long time storage marketer and occasional host of Geekspeak, a live radio program and podcast from the NPR affiliate in his home town of Santa Cruz, CA. His wife creates amazing wedding cakes.

Drew’s coming aboard to help us address the small and medium sized business (SMB) market segment. We’ve added this new section, ReadyNAS in Business, to the forums for folks that are depending on ReadyNAS products to protect and manage their data in companies with more than 15 people. Market definitions always vary widely, but we’d like to hear from you if you are:
- Doing tech supporting more than yourself and your family
- Trying to manage backup and recovery tasks
- Thinking about a server virtualization project
- Concerned with the growth and management of business data

Watch for Drew in the Forums as “Dengar” and be sure to send your comments, questions and suggestions on future rack-mount products straight to him in the new Forum section!

[dengar]

Thanks for the welcome, yoh-dah! I'm happy to be onboard and look forward to the conversations.

Check out the http://www.geekspeak.org/ for the GeekSpeak podcast and http://www.edithmeyer.com if you need a quick break from systems administration...

[chirpa]

if you need a quick break from systems administration...

Off-topic a bit, but when can we expect a ReadyNAS styled cake?

[Dooku]

if you need a quick break from systems administration...

Off-topic a bit, but when can we expect a ReadyNAS styled cake?

Welcome


Hmm cake

[dbott67]

Or maybe...



or...



or...

[yoh-dah]

This thread is turning into Cabana real fast.

[super-poussin]

from Netapp ? will we see a simulator and or a data-vault ??????????

Welcome on board

[Han Solo]

Welcome on board.

[energy59]

Welcome mate! great work for you... bye from italy

[BobRoss]

Welcome! Although I am new so I can't really welcome anyone yet!

[Knothaid]

Welcome Dengar....I was losing hope of doing anything business wise. It is like a different dialect around here, no offense to anyone else, just that I (we) have different needs. This should be a positive step.

[kpurcell]

Not sure if I'm the first poster with a business related post but here it goes.

I own a web development company and we have many Ready NAS systems, 2 NVs and 2 NV+. We have units in our offices and each partner has one unit at home. I use rsync to push critical data from the office to my house in case of hardware failure or fire etc. Same thing at home, family photos and music gets pushed to a private share on the office units.

My units have performed flawlessly but partner has had a power supply failure and bought a new unit. It was faster than getting a replacement PSU fron Infrant. He moved the drives over to the new unit and rebuilt the volumes without losing a file. Once the replacement came he swapped out the PSU and mounted new drives into the original unit. So far so good.

Our office is on commercial 3 phase power since we are in a semi-industrial area. That has sometimes given us pretty extreme outages and surges. I have my NAS hooked up to an APC 1500KVA UPS which occasionally runs for extended times. One day I let it run for 4 hours before shutting down the NAS. At the power level required the NAS could have stayed online for another 12 hours!

My one complaint so far has is capacity but I see that a higher capacity unit is available.

[dengar]

Hey Karen - this is a nice story, especially the long run time on your UPS. You might want to consider posting it in the success story section here:
http://www.readynas.com/?p=171#comment-1209

Other posters are talking about business in other threads in this section. Thanks for visiting!

Drew

[stiophan]

Drew

Nice to see Netgear is looking at more on the SMB area. Where I am interested is looking at the best alternatives to the typical backup tapes that are still is widespread use in small organisations as their sole backup for their single servers or P2P networks. My personal experience in a sme VAR, is that tapes are usually reliable but getting personnel to remember to put the tapes in is a constant problem. Tape backup speeds are only fast and offer good capacity at the high end and that can often cost the same as the server!

My questions for a NAS solution are:

THe one main issue with NAS as a backup is their on-site nature. If there is a Fire (more likely a flood now!) then no matter how good the NAS, all the data is gone... Online backup is still quite expensive and as we know broadband links are not the most reliable. Most SME's will not keep a net connection running as an idle fallover. While I have not had customers experience fires or floods that meant a total data loss, the time it takes now to recover can total up but as we know SME's don't do alot of disaster planning as they can't afford to.
Personally I think no NAS aimed at the SME space should offer nothing less that RAID5. RAID1 to me is better for backup to HDD and then needing tape as the offline. At least you can be pretty sure that if one HDD fails that business can continue on...
We were starting to look at RAID5+1 in case two drives failed. As the costs of drives is fractional then this becomes possible.
Backup software is still quite complex for most SME's and the ability to do a complete non-identical restore to a new server box is still costly. What backup options are out there that can cover some of them. Ideally one package but perhaps 2-3 depending on the frequency they run. I like packages that offer instant backup and not wait for scheduled times even if they are incrementals.
Whats the best options to increase LAN throughput speeds. Even gbit is still quite slow and thats assuming minimal traffic over standard CAT5e connections and no intermediate hubs. Jumbo frame features are still somewhat of a black magic art. Could we see the return of Firewire as a faster LAN tech for NAS or whats Netgears view of CAT6 ROI.
Finally Green tech- most NAS drives when not doing backup are idle of periods-say overnight. Whats your view of developments here Drew? Some info on NAS drives with LCD displays. More flexible power management features or just more built in smart tech to optimise it for us. Even some view of the savings its making to electric bills would be nice. Are we likely to see Netgear use the more efficient PSUs we see on sale now. Perhaps built in UPS's? or Power adapters with simple UPS features fitted.

[dengar]

Wow, lots of questions. Here's my take.

We agree that tape is a pain for the SMB. Few people need to archive at that price!

A ReadyNAS can replicate offsite to another ReadyNAS, which is a great solution for synchronizong a single copy of your data. As we build more business models we are looking at offering replication with a secure component so you don't need a VPN to move the data safely. In addition, we may look at optional offsite archive services in the cloud, so you can pick what you want to keep, let the ReadyNAS dump it to a datacenter at night and pay by the GB. No more tape, native recovery formats and multiple layers that can be implemented on one single platform.

Restores to non-identical boxes is the holy grail and I think it is here today for a VAR that can learn VMware, Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V. Storing your desktops and servers as virtual machines on a ReadyNAS means instantly starting up a new client including OS, settings and apps. Our iSCSI beta release went up on the forums today and if you have a Pro you should try this out. BTW, this is where data deduplication technologies really prove their value and earn their prices!

RAID 6 is far more cost effective than RAID 5+1, and I'm sure that will become the SMB standard as drives get larger. See the thread around here on disk drive capacity and rebuild times.

As far as interfaces, the fast one are expensive. I can think of Infiniband (no way), SAS (still too expensive) and eSATA. eSATA is gaining traction but nothing is as universal as TCP/IP for getting offsite, so I think your choice is to look at investing in the WAN or in local capacity. A second ReadyNAS as a target may be more cost effective than upgrading your WAN gear. Some VARs are considering services that move data from small ReadyNAS in the field to a larger centralized model for a montly fee for their customers. Smart networks will use multiple NICs on their switches to segment traffic and that's an important feature for a business-class storage system (and switch, for that matter).

I get my energy from the sun at home, but I still hate wasteful devices. Power supply choices are purely cost-driven for us but the RAIDiator feature that schedules my system power on/off cut my home ReadyNAS consumption in half and probably doubled the lifespan. That's good ROI for anyone!

Hope this helps, and feel free to disagree,

Drew