TeraStation Update

The TeraStation works! I am waiting for the Cisco Gigabyte up links that I ordered for our switches so that it can kick up the transfer speed. Right now it they are just connected to 100 Mb links.

I had one TeraStation at our Grayslake site and one at our Libertyville site. This was going to be my plan but it came clear early on that our T1 wouldn't be able to handle the replication traffic because I couldn't schedule it to run at night. So, I moved the one at our Libertyville site to our youth building on the same property in Grayslake. There is a fiber connection between the two sites and makes backups a breeze. So far things are working well. My last automated email status update said that it was up to 7% usage.

Buffalo TeraStation Pro II

At The Chapel, our Communications team creates several gigabytes of video's and pictures each week that we need to keep. The problem right now is that our video team is keeping most of these video's locally on their machines. That is bad as you may know.

Our short term solution is to go with two Buffalo TeraStation Pro II, 2 TB NAS devices. I have heard some good things about them and their price tag is hard to beat (about $0.50 a Gig!).

So we are running both of these in RAID 5 and backing up from one of them to the other.

Pros:

• Cheap
• Rack Mount
• Several RAID levels including RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD
• Web management
• DFS and automated backups
• FTP and AFP support

Cons:

• The management of the hard disks and RAID doesn't have as many features as I would hope.
• Buffalo's implementation of DFS is a far cry from what you get in Server 2003 R2. You also can't throttle the synchronization bandwidth.
• The documentation is OK but you can tell that it has been translated and it doesn't go into much detail on DFS or FTP configurations.
• When you join the unit to Active Directory you can't use FTP anymore.
• Only one NIC