Black Morty Rackham
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2004
- Messages
- 4,728
Hi everyone,
I work at a small company. It's not a single company, as such. It's sort of half-way between an ad agency and a rent-an-office sort of space. We're a bunch of people all running our own companies, but we do a certain degree of work together as well. Up until now, we don't actually have a network of our own and it's a huge pain in the ass. People are sending huge files to each-other via Sprend or Hightail or similar services, via wifi. Having a dozen people send 100-megabyte files across wifi back and forth all day is not much fun. There is a physical network in place which I've spent the day sorting out. It seems to be working, so at least now we have gigabit ethernet to all workstations. But I still need to sort out the whole file server issue and that's where I need a hand.
My ideal solution would be something like Dropbox, except hosted in-house. There's going to be a maximum of about 30 users, but probably no more than 15 at any one time. I want each user to be able to store files locally on their computer and synced to the file server. Sharing files between several users and such would be necessary here, and being able to access files from outside the local network as well. Mobile apps would be neat but isn't required. Is there such a thing? If not, I'll settle for some kind of NAS setup where we just access a normal file server. Ideally with some kind of external connectivity though. What are the best options here on a shoestring budget? I doubt we'll need more than about 8 TB of storage, preferably in RAID10 or something such for read performance and data safety. This thing won't be the most mission critical thing ever, though. We'll all keep our own backups as well on external drives and such. I'm mostly building it for convenience rather than safety, but that doesn't mean I can ignore the safety aspects.
I think we've got an old Mac Mini that's not being used. We can buy some kind of external storage housing to attach to it. Maybe even a new small computer.
Other info: we're sitting on a fibre internet connection, and it usually reaches about 50 Mbps. It's not really great but it's fast enough for the most part. But if we start syncing all our data to an external cloud service, our internet will get awfully slow awfully quickly. That's one of the reasons I want something local. Also, space is much cheaper locally in the long run.
What are my options? Any recommendations? Am I barking up the wrong tree with the whole "our own cloud" thing?
Edit: forgot to mention, the network is mostly Macs. There are a few of us using Windows though. No Linux machines yet -- but that might change.
I work at a small company. It's not a single company, as such. It's sort of half-way between an ad agency and a rent-an-office sort of space. We're a bunch of people all running our own companies, but we do a certain degree of work together as well. Up until now, we don't actually have a network of our own and it's a huge pain in the ass. People are sending huge files to each-other via Sprend or Hightail or similar services, via wifi. Having a dozen people send 100-megabyte files across wifi back and forth all day is not much fun. There is a physical network in place which I've spent the day sorting out. It seems to be working, so at least now we have gigabit ethernet to all workstations. But I still need to sort out the whole file server issue and that's where I need a hand.
My ideal solution would be something like Dropbox, except hosted in-house. There's going to be a maximum of about 30 users, but probably no more than 15 at any one time. I want each user to be able to store files locally on their computer and synced to the file server. Sharing files between several users and such would be necessary here, and being able to access files from outside the local network as well. Mobile apps would be neat but isn't required. Is there such a thing? If not, I'll settle for some kind of NAS setup where we just access a normal file server. Ideally with some kind of external connectivity though. What are the best options here on a shoestring budget? I doubt we'll need more than about 8 TB of storage, preferably in RAID10 or something such for read performance and data safety. This thing won't be the most mission critical thing ever, though. We'll all keep our own backups as well on external drives and such. I'm mostly building it for convenience rather than safety, but that doesn't mean I can ignore the safety aspects.
I think we've got an old Mac Mini that's not being used. We can buy some kind of external storage housing to attach to it. Maybe even a new small computer.
Other info: we're sitting on a fibre internet connection, and it usually reaches about 50 Mbps. It's not really great but it's fast enough for the most part. But if we start syncing all our data to an external cloud service, our internet will get awfully slow awfully quickly. That's one of the reasons I want something local. Also, space is much cheaper locally in the long run.
What are my options? Any recommendations? Am I barking up the wrong tree with the whole "our own cloud" thing?
Edit: forgot to mention, the network is mostly Macs. There are a few of us using Windows though. No Linux machines yet -- but that might change.