Thinking of switching a client from a Windows server to Synology NAS...

[thecomputerguy]

I have a client who works in construction and they currently have a 5 year old windows server running 2012R2 with about 1TB of total storage in a RAID10 that is approaching it's storage capacity so we're starting to talk about the future.

12 Workstations total.

The ONLY reason they need a windows server is because their main accounting software is Sage and it requires a Windows server to run (SQL). Other than that I do have it setup for folder redirection which is one of the reasons why storage is an issue with some employees storing 100GB+ of personal pictures etc.

They are considering moving to a full cloud based solution for accounting before any hardware decisions are made. If they do choose to goto this fully cloud based solution then I am thinking they have zero need for a windows server.

Their data is primarily documents, spreadsheets, pictures, and PDF's. In the future they will need some better options for remote access because they currently use LogMeIn.

I'm thinking of going with a 8Bay Synology NAS (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KMKDW42/) with a total storage of 28TB in SHR. Also including the add-on PCI-e card (M2D18 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07G9S674X/) which allows for NVme drives (2x500GB 970 Evo's) as R/W Cache and also bumping up the internal memory to 32GB. Total cost is about $2500 and I can see a windows server EASILY costing double maybe triple.

This is obviously way overkill but it will provide them with enough guaranteed fast onsite storage for the next 5+ years and there is plenty of budget for it. Dropping total capacity doesn't save more than a few hundred so I don't see the point because going to a smaller NAS drops the M2D18 card from NVme to SATA SSD or drops the M2D18 altogether.

For remote access... Enabling Quickconnect for easy outside access to files, enabling the VPN functionality for people that want to do it that way.

Instead of folder redirection setup the cloud station and setup the real-time workstation backup.

For cloud backup go with something like Amazon Glacier, for onsite backup just backup to a couple of large externals for the first few years then we may have to build another backup NAS if their data starts approaching 10TB+.

My thoughts are the Synology will provide us with a much more storage at a much better cost than a windows server and super easy remote access support. A NAS is perfect for the type of data they are using as long as they go with cloud accounting. One downfall would obviously be losing folder redirection but I think the real-time backup could cover that.

After that I can't really think of any downsides to just moving them to a NAS ... can anyone else?

 

[SAFCasper]

Something you may not have considered is support.

Lets say this NAS fails in 8 months time. The standard RMA process is to send the unit back to Synology before they will send out a replacement. So I would expect a minimum 3-4 business days before you have a working replacement. I would also expect the replacement to be returned at factory defaults, so you have to configure everything again.

If they go for a full Windows server from Dell, HP etc you have options such as NDB or 4-hour reponse, with an engineer coming on-site to perform the repair.

So you need to determine if the extra cost is worthwhile to your client. 12 staff unable to do their job for 3-4 days could loose them 10x more than the additional cost of a server. But they might be cheap and willing to take the risk. Or they might have other work staff could do for a few days in an emergency so it's no big deal.


PS.
Synology do offer an advanced replacement service named Synology Replacement Service (SRS) but it's not available for that model in the USA. It's mostly for larger rack-mount systems.

Closest model I can see that is included would be the FS1018 - but this is SSD only. You would have to either cut down on capacity or spend a lot more. You can check the models here - https://www.synology.com/en-uk/solution/SRS

 

[thecomputerguy]

Something you may not have considered is support.

Lets say this NAS fails in 8 months time. The standard RMA process is to send the unit back to Synology before they will send out a replacement. So I would expect a minimum 3-4 business days before you have a working replacement. I would also expect the replacement to be returned at factory defaults, so you have to configure everything again.

If they go for a full Windows server from Dell, HP etc you have options such as NDB or 4-hour reponse, with an engineer coming on-site to perform the repair.

So you need to determine if the extra cost is worthwhile to your client. 12 staff unable to do their job for 3-4 days could loose them 10x more than the additional cost of a server. But they might be cheap and willing to take the risk. Or they might have other work staff could do for a few days in an emergency so it's no big deal.


PS.
Synology do offer an advanced replacement service named Synology Replacement Service (SRS) but it's not available for that model in the USA. It's mostly for larger rack-mount systems.

Closest model I can see that is included would be the FS1018 - but this is SSD only. You would have to either cut down on capacity or spend a lot more. You can check the models here - https://www.synology.com/en-uk/solution/SRS

That is very true ... but I have had a Synology NAS fail on me before and the wonderful thing about them is as long as you get a replacement NAS equal to or greater than the size of your current NAS you can simply just drop the drives into the new NAS and the new NAS will adopt everything from the previous NAS. Hell I could just buy an extra NAS of the same size in preparation for something like that and just keep it in storage and it would still be significantly cheaper than a Windows Server provided it would survive 3-5 years in storage.

That or I could just overnight another NAS from where ever I could get it the cheapest.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Are they on O365? If so, OneDrive basically handles the Folder Redirection, and Teams for file sharing.

 

[SAFCasper]

That is very true ... but I have had a Synology NAS fail on me before and the wonderful thing about them is as long as you get a replacement NAS equal to or greater than the size of your current NAS you can simply just drop the drives into the new NAS and the new NAS will adopt everything from the previous NAS. Hell I could just buy an extra NAS of the same size in preparation for something like that and just keep it in storage and it would still be significantly cheaper than a Windows Server provided it would survive 3-5 years in storage.

That or I could just overnight another NAS from where ever I could get it the cheapest.

Learn something new every day. Never realised you could just drop the drives into another model. I expected even with a replacement of the same model you might have difficulty.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Are they on O365? If so, OneDrive basically handles the Folder Redirection, and Teams for file sharing.

Yes they are but these are the types of people that are terrified that their data is "On the Cloud, where the Russians can get it" even though they don't realize their email is cloud based and they use cloud services all day long. I'll have to have the same talk with them about Glacier as I've had many times already.

That and I recently converted a client from simple local file sharing to file sharing using Onedrive and Sharepoint and there seems to be a lot of quirky issues with Teams, Sharepoint, and Onedrive. Clients randomly getting logged out of Onedrive, Teams being too much for them them (they just want a Z drive with their data in it), Onedrive syncing, especially uploading taking a long time to resolve changes. Autosave causing people to work over each other when they prefer the file to be locked out into read only.

I think Sharepoint/Onedrive is a great tool for people who are maybe a little more cognizent of what the hell they are doing.

These poeple have had a Z drive for over a decade and if that changes there will be mass confusion.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Learn something new every day. Never realised you could just drop the drives into another model. I expected even with a replacement of the same model you might have difficulty.

Yeah honestly Synology makes a great product they make a lot of things very simple that are quite a bit more difficult from a setup standpoint in a Windows environment. Windows is great for automating things like Folder redirection and group policy but with the cloud station and backup I think that may not be an issue at all.

My client whose Synology NAS failed had the upgraded 8 bay version overnighted when theirs died while they shipped theirs to Synology. I just transferred the drives and the RAM and everything adopted as if it were the original NAS. When they got their NAS back we ordered new drives and configured it the same exact way as the now new one and then configured it in it high availability configuration so they then had two NAS's mirroring each other so if one went down the other one would kick into primary automatically essentially limiting downtime to near zero (theoretically) in the event of a failure.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Learn something new every day. Never realised you could just drop the drives into another model. I expected even with a replacement of the same model you might have difficulty.

SHR also allows for endless upgrade-ability as well as long as you have a NAS that supports more drives. You could start with an 8 bay and then 5 years later expand to a 16 bay and technically drop the original drives into it, perform an adoption, then expand it with more drives as long as they are in SHR. Other RAIDS like RAID10 I'm not sure are as easily expandable but I'm pretty sure RAID10 will outperform SHR all day long.

 

[trevm999]

Why would they need to lose the folder redirection?

 

[thecomputerguy]

Why would they need to lose the folder redirection?

Does Synology support automatic folder redirection like in a Windows server environment using a GPO? I wouldn't want to manually map 15 workstations desktop, docs, pictures, music etc to the NAS.

Not only that ... but that would also make them 100% dependent on the NAS. At least if the NAS failed they would be able to work locally and be able to answer emails and work, they just wouldn't have their data drive available until I could get it fixed. Redirecting everything to the NAS would create a single point of failure and their local profiles would probably be borked in the event of a NAS failure.

 

[trevm999]

Does Synology support automatic folder redirection like in a Windows server environment using a GPO? I wouldn't want to manually map 15 workstations desktop, docs, pictures, music etc to the NAS.

My bad, in my brain I thought that your title was saying turn the NAS into the DC, which was supported by Synology NAS the last I checked. They would be doing via Samba, in which case you just point RSAT to the NAS in order to manage GPO

 

[Markverhyden]

Learn something new every day. Never realised you could just drop the drives into another model. I expected even with a replacement of the same model you might have difficulty.

*nix's are great for that reason.

 

[VISA MC]

We have several clients using Sage without a Windows server. I think it only must be running on a Windows machine and shared off of that.

 

[trevm999]

We have several clients using Sage without a Windows server. I think it only must be running on a Windows machine and shared off of that.

It's against the Windows 10 EULA to use it as a server with only specific exceptions allowed as outlined in the EULA. MS SQL Server 2017 can run on Linux though.

 

[HCHTech]

w/r/t Synology configuration, you can backup the configuration to a file on a local machine, then restore that to a new NAS = 2-minute job to restore to a new box. We keep copies of these for all of our clients that have them, same for Sonicwall configs. More than once this has made us look like the hero when we have to replace a device.

 

[brandonkick]

Does Synology support automatic folder redirection like in a Windows server environment using a GPO? I wouldn't want to manually map 15 workstations desktop, docs, pictures, music etc to the NAS.

Not only that ... but that would also make them 100% dependent on the NAS. At least if the NAS failed they would be able to work locally and be able to answer emails and work, they just wouldn't have their data drive available until I could get it fixed. Redirecting everything to the NAS would create a single point of failure and their local profiles would probably be borked in the event of a NAS failure.

I thought the same thing... but in one location I did folder redirection on a handful of windows 10 desktops for desktop and documents pointed to the synology sitting on their network. I discovered that there is an option to keep offline versions basically. I tested this by disabling the NIC on a machine which had it's desktop and documents folders redirected to the NAS and there were still the same files on the desktop and documents folder and they were still accessible. So it's not a single point of failure in that sense, the only thing a failure would do is cause the changes going forward to any offline data to be at risk of loss if the desktop fails.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Going to be inplementing a mix of these two features built into the NAS

Continous workstation backup:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/personal_backup

Server/NAS/Workstation image backups:
https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/help/CloudStationBackup/cloudstationbackup

Along with a HyperBackup file backup on the server to external hard drives.

Along with a HyberBackup file backup to a Cloud bucket like Amazon or B2