[thelist] should we get a server...?

[Kristian Rink]

Hi all;

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 01:14:58 -0800
"chris hardy" <lists at semioticpixels.com> wrote:

> http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=28496

This is an interesting piece of hardware; however you might run into
trouble in several ways with those:

* Upgrading / servicing hardware. What happens if that box is full? May
  you easily replace the drive with just a bigger one? 

* Reliability - what sort of technology is inside this machine? Does it
   provide any sort of support for creating redundancy to capture
   hardware faults (or user misbehaviour)? Is it robust enough for
   everyday full-load usage?

* Backup - you then still run with the difficulty of getting all this
  data stored on some other medium, likewise you might need
  a fast way to restore all that data in case something really goes
  totally wrong.

To be brutally honest on that: Both the Mirra box or the idea of running
a "mini mac" as storage box is completely perfect if you're running a
single home-user system, to store some holiday images or mp3 files or
whatever, but it will _not_ do if you want to get a professional,
reliable solution to store your company data on it, because that's
definitely not what they are supposed to. Professional NAS machines for
enterprise usage are _expensive_ ( > $ 7k for the cheapest of those,
good Tandbergs >> $ 10k) for some good reasons (reliable hardware, fault
tolerance, scalability, ...). If you're running a company relying on
digital data, you should never forget that those data probably are what
you are living on, you should protect this in an appropriate way.

Cheers,
Kris