How would you configure a small business server with 3 or 4 hard disks

[holch]

Hi!

First of all, appologies if this is not 100% the correct forum.

I was searching on the net and didn't find any forum that was treating with more general questions about certain setups of a small business server. I thought chances to find some good advice and opinions here would be high.

I own a HP Proliant Microserver n36L where I installed (after a hard fight) Zentyal on the disk that came with the server (160GB).

The server has 4 slots for HDD. So I was thinking I would do the following:

HDD 1 --  160GB -- Zentyal system partition
HDD 2 --     1TB -- Software-Raid 1 -- Disk 2.1
HDD 3 --     1TB -- Software-Raid 1 -- Disk 2.2
HDD 4 --     1TB -- Backup disk for short term backups

External Docking-Station for SATA, connected via eSata for the long term external backups.

What do you think of this backup? Would you change something? Would you rather drop the Raid 1 for something else?

The server will mainly work as a file server in a small business environment. It should provide us with the possibility to share files and just have one project folder and everyone in the company (3-4 at the moment) have access to certain files.

[robb]

I would definitely NOT drop the raid1. To bad you can't put 5 disks in the server. With 5 disks I would go for a raid1 for system and raid5 for data.
Although a system restore is easy enough, your setup is probably enough, however, if possible I would use a hardware raid adapter (with at teast 512 cach and battery backed to avoid dataloss when the adapter fails).

For longterm backup: I would use 3 esata disks so you have a disk offsite all time. (1 attached to the server, 1 from 1 day back on the shelf and 1 from 2 days back at home and 'round-robin' them)

Is there an option to backup to a cloudservice? I know, you have to trust them, but at least you have your data on a remote location and with decent encryption they will have a hell of a time decoding the data.

[holch]

Hi Rob,

Thank you for getting back to me.

Well, in theory there would be the possibility to put a disk where the DVD-rom would go, but I guess for the moment I won't go for that.

I heard so many bad things about hardware raid that I wanted to skip this. I am more a "hobby" sysadmin, so I am rather going for the easy and easy controlable stuff. ;-)

Harddisks are fairly expensive down here in Brazil, so I would rather use the 160GB one for now, even if it takes up one valuable slot in the server.

The 3 different disks sound good, but I think our file turnaround isn't that big that it would be worth to go for a external back up every day. Hmm, not easy to decide. What would you recommend as a longer term backup? Or is that not so important? Because in your stategy backups only go back 2-3 days.

Backup to a cloudservice is of course a good idea, but not really an option. Bandwith here in Brazil is ridiculous and we are running on a 10 Mega DSL, which should have 500-600 K upstream. I guess backing up on a cloud service would take me weeks... ;-)

[half_life]

Setup open nas on an old machine in another room. Use zfs and setup snapshots.  Share a drive to your zentyal server and point to that for backups.  It is up to you or probably more importantly disk limitations how long you keep backups.  If you are running Win7 pro or above it gives the added benefit of giving you a central location for Win7's built in backup solution.  Did I mention that it understands active directory? 

[holch]

Hi Half_life,

Thank you for the the response. This would be the next step, but at the moment I am trying to figure out how to make the best out of the 4 disks in the server itself. I am currently coming from a system with almost no or very sporatic backups, so everything is a step ahead already. But I would like to have a good start, because it is difficult to change things afterwards.

I have one 160gb for the system, 2x 1TB for data and then there is still a slot where I don't have a disk yet.

[ichat]

first of all let me explain that a lot of this is based on personall preferences and there is no real best case.

but in general  hardware raid today is only worth it if you run professional grade stuff that lets you build large file-clusers of  large sets of disks, in smaller user- cases many people believe it would be more cost efficient to instead buy a better cpu (extra cores).  and use software raid.

now it all depends  on choices,  you could opt for  raid1  as writhing to is is faster, and it lakes less load on your server.
but you could also drop it and use raid5  for better (way better) read speeds, and more diskspace  whil sacrefising short term backups...

on the other hand you could than replace your dvd driver for a  sata bracket and make it hotswapable   so you can replace (and rotate, your backup drives at any given time / scedule  you wish...   after all  you wil most likly never use your dvd  drive other than for installing the os (you could instead use a usb pendrive for that too).

its all just matter of choice but remember   if in doubt try it in a simulated envirment  you can download  email / webrowsing bots  to simulate load quite easily.

[holch]

Hi ichat,

Thank you for your opinion. That is what I am looking for. I know that I won't find THE ideal set up, but at least I get different opinions and views on the setup.

I will also look into the option of Raid 5, but at the moment prices for hard disks are quite high and they are already high under normal conditions here in Brazil. So I will try to go with what I have at the moment, I guess.

Maybe for now, while I don't have a 3rd 1TB disk to do backups it is better to have one of the 2 as the data disk and the other for backups and skip the Raid 1 for now and only configure it, once I have the 3rd 1TB disk.

What do you think?