NAS & Web-Server Hardware

[D-T]

I've recently started encroaching on the upper limits of my desktop's storage capacity once again and, instead of buying yet another HDD to patch over the problem for another year or so, I've decided to sort out a proper home NAS using RAID. While I've had plenty of experience building independent systems, I must confess I have very little idea of the hardware specifications required to handle data processing over a network (and have struggled to find relevant information online, beyond "how to configure your home NAS" type guides). So, if any of you can offer any advice – particularly with regards to hardware – or provide links to relevant sources of information it'd be greatly appreciated. While I'd quite like to build & configure the system from scratch, I'm not entirely averse to using a pre-built NAS system if those of you with more experience think it might offer a better solution.

While I'd be looking to employ this for home use first, I wouldn't mind over-engineering it slightly to make use of as a learning experience; I'd possibly consider using the lessons learned to implement a similar business solution at work in the near future. I'm an Information Systems graduate working for a small engineering company and there's very little IT infrastructure in-place to speak of; we're currently using Windows File Sharing to provide basic access to key directories on systems across the network, with no provisions for data redundancy beyond the backups I've taken it upon myself to produce – less than ideal.

Both at work and at home we have a small local network consisting of <5 PCs and a few mobile devices, of which the only critical ones are tablets running Windows 8.1 x86-64. In both cases, the primary purpose of the NAS would be to provide access to centralised remote file storage, with the secondary advantages of continuous availability across the network, greater configurability and the data redundancy provided by RAID (something which is currently lacking). At work, the current network throughput is nothing more significant than remote access to photos and documents (so files under ~5MB) on maximum of 3 systems at any one time. At home, this is likely to be extended to streaming 1080p video on up to 4 or 5 devices simultaneously.

I'd also be prepared to consider slightly more sophisticated solutions to utilise as a home/office web server, hosting 1 or 2 simple static-content HTML/CSS websites, taking over from the third-party hosting services we're currently paying for – although I'm aware that would raise a range of reliability concerns in the business application, especially as the webmail service is critical to operations.

As I said before, any help you can offer on understanding the hardware requirements for each of these applications or on the practicalities of implementing a solution would be much appreciated. I've never really undertaken a project of this kind before, at least from the hardware perspective. Constructive advice favoured over remarks on how blatantly foolish this might be, I'm prepared to tinker on a home set-up before looking to implement anything of the kind at work.

Cheers!

TL;DR: Looking to set up a relatively low-bandwidth NAS and/or web server for potential home & office applications. Requesting advice/information on system hardware requirements. Thanks!

[herulach]

N54l is the cheapest you'll get a reasonably capable chassis for, can take four drives. Mine is more than capable of a sustained 35mbps transfer (saturates the wifi) and would probably go faster if I had anything other than a printer wired to it. They do have some limitations, not least that they're quite loud, however mine has been sat with nothing more than a couple of reboots for about 3.5years doing exactly what you describe + xbmc.

[peterb]

You don't need particularly high end hardware for home use. What you might need are plenty of SATA ports if you think you will need a lot of storage.

So pretty much any desktop computer, a Linux distro, Samba for file sharing, and if you want to look at web based applications, Apache Web server. Job done - in a nutshell! You can add a mail server (Postfix is pretty good) and an IMAP_ or POP3 server (Dovecot) and the rest is up t your imagination. If you want resilience, you can RAId two or more hard drives with MDADM - just use two in RAID 1 to give mirroring. The software won't cost you anything - how much you spend on hardware is down to your budget, but you can do it pretty cheaply if you are experimenting.

I have much the same setup here running on a mini-itx board with a 1.2Ghz processor.

[D-T]

Thanks very much guys, got some old hardware I should be able to recycle so I'll focus funds on HDDs, experiment from there and see how I get on. Appreciate the help & advice!

[ChaosSystem]

Is your web server hosting content for internal access only or for public access?
I would keep them separate if it is for public access. In fact a separate network (DMZ) would be recommended for public facing web sites.

[D-T]

Is your web server hosting content for internal access only or for public access?
I would keep them separate if it is for public access. In fact a separate network (DMZ) would be recommended for public facing web sites.

The web server would host one or two public-facing static websites, which I would probably configure to run off a single partition to which the web daemons have access. Webmail is something else I'd have to consider carefully.

Separate to that, I'd be planning on serving content across the LAN from a RAID - with access to the RAID restricted to root and either a few named users or a specific user group. Would this achieve enough of a 'DMZ' or is it really worth setting up a separate network for internal data? Surely that level of isolation would also call for setting up a second (entirely independent) server?

[ChaosSystem]

I guess it depends on how sensitive your corporate data is. I like to keep a well defined line between LAN and WAN/Public servers. For the price of the N54L I don't see why you cannot have 2 servers
Also look at the point of maintenance. If you have to take your web server down, should it affect your NAS?

[D-T]

All good points; thanks very much for the advice.