Looking for a Solid IT/Network Company

[Bob Zelin]

if you state what NAS that you own (SNS, Small Tree, etc.) I can make a recommendation.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Peter Garriott]

Bob, I’m not going to lie. I was worried you were going to respond to this! Unfortunately, our current NAS server was already in existence, when I started this job, and it is not from SNS, Small Tree..etc, but basically a little company that doesn’t have a great service record. So obviously, not an ideal situation.

Here are the specs though:

2 x CPU : Xeon 2.4 GHZ
96GB of Ram
24 4TB Western Digital enterprise Disks
HighPoint Rocket Raid Card
Supermicro case / mo-board

[Bob Zelin]

If you have a pre made NAS from a company like QNAP, Thecus, Synology, Netgear, etc. you can find someone. And of course, any of the name brand companies (SNS, Small Tree, etc.) will always help you.

But if you have a home made solution (an guy that built you a PC server with a 24 bay Supermicro chassis and a Highpoint host controller), and now things don’t work, I just don’t know anyone that can help you. I can only assume that he just doesn’t want to show up, or he will only show up if you give him a “support contract”, and it’s too expensive.

I assume that this is a Win 2008 or Win 2012 server – correct ?

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Peter Garriott]

Thanks Bob. This is helpful information. As far as I can tell, this is a homemade solution running FreeNAS.

At the moment, it is running fine, but occasionally there’s hard-drive failures..etc.

[Alex Gardiner]

With 96GB of memory its pretty much gotta be a ZFS box 😉

The hardware is always going to be your risk – such is DIY.

However, from what I can tell IX Systems (the FreeNAS people) will readily sell support for their software – which is a big safety net. Also, they’ll know how to optimise/configure the pool for a post production workload… if not the tuning is not especially difficult to do yourself.

—
+447961751453
github.com/indiestor
indiestor.com – “Avid project sharing, shared!”

[Bob Zelin]

I guess FreeNAS isn’t free.
If you have a hard drive failure (which ALL systems have – even mine), you are at the mercy of the disk drive host adaptor, not the ZFS OS, or the home brew system that was created here. You simply contact the manufacturer (LSI Logic, ATTO, Areca, Highpoint, etc.) and say “I have a hard drive failure, how do I resolve this”. So now it is YOUR responsibility to say “gee, what disk drive host adaptor do I have, and how do I contact this manufacturer” (hint – Google). People often ask me “what exactly do you do for a living” – and I often respond “I read the manual”. If I was called by your company, and I had no idea of what was going on, but I had a hard drive failure in the RAID array, and I was unfamiliar with what to do, I would say “gee, what OS do I have” and then I would CALL (yes, on the phone, not an email) the company that made the disk drive host adaptor, and say “can you help me”. Not Creative Cow,.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Jon Thomasberg]

https://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_storage.html#replacing-a-failed-drive