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Storage and Backup - Saving Your Bacon - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

by Mike McNamee Published 01/12/2015

The Imagemaker System
We chose to go for Synology NAS boxes. These are populated each with five 4TB drives along with one hot spare. A RAID configuration 6 is employed (www.raid-calculator.com/) to deliver 12TB of storage, 3x read speed, zero write speed increase and 2-drive failure tolerance. The 2-drive tolerance was chosen because of experience with a failing drive wrecking a drive alongside with the vibration of failure. For the same reason a hot spare is also used - this detects failure and takes a failing drive out of service straight away and brings itself on stream. The disks in the array are hot swappable, that is you can pull out a drive and replace it without any interruption of service to the users.

Another feature of Synology is two-factor verification using Google Authenticator. When the system is accessed over the network, a pass code is demanded. This can only be obtained on the user's smart phone and the code expires after about 15 seconds. To break into the system, the hacker has to have worked out your Admin name and password, and also to have stolen your smart phone, and have either your finger (for fingerprint ID) or have cracked your phone password as well. It's easy to use and very secure.

RAID Arrays
As soon as tolerance to hard drive failure is required, it is necessary to employ RAID systems. Depending upon the type of RAID used the system can be made faster, more tolerant to failure, higher capacity and combinations of all three. This call-out box lists the main types of RAID. The table shows the compromise that has to be made for security; you always lose storage capacity over the sum of the hard drives you have purchased. For the Imagemaker system we chose to use a hybrid of RAID 6 which is available on the Synology. With Synology software, setting up the array is relatively straightforward.

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Contact Mike McNamee

1st Published 01/12/2015
last update 09/12/2022 14:59:21

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