Do you own a NAS and are you looking after it well?

Synology NAS box

Synology, one manufacturer of NAS box’s

A strange question for the uninitiated. What is a NAS and what sort of food does it eat and how should I be treating it?

My focus recently has been all about storage and the space we are each using to store our data. (Whatever that data maybe). From faster drives to access the data to storage solution on the cloud and in the office. It is one of the most important and common questions I am asked.

One solution doesn’t meet everyone’s needs. But a combination of solutions is usually what people use and sometimes chaotically with no thought on how this will progress and what the strategy is or should be.

So what is a NAS?

Well, it isn’t a small creature that keeps you company and helps with your storage and access to data. Well, that is not completely true it does allow storage and access to data in various ways and will cleverly backup said data in different ways. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. A system of storage media that is attached to your network at home or work. Over the years this type of storage has become more and more intelligent and can literally be a self-contained computer system that runs all your data and data access. It can be a small unit to a much larger unit. Various companies make them and they are, well what can I say I am biased, brilliant.

I have used one for business for over 8 years now and it has served me well. I can store data on it and it has internal drives that automatically backup to each other creating what is called a mirror of my data. I also can, and have configured it to back up to a cloud drive and have chosen the important data to back up in this way. So I have offsite data as well.

The NAS unit allows me to access it remotely over the Internet, (Through a secure connection), so my own personal cloud drive with access. I can add users and give them a proportion of the space and they can store their data there and we can collaborate on data.

Benefits

This is a lower costs system to having a fully-fledged file server in your office and still allows multiple access by users and storage and remote access. It has a configuration panel that is easy to understand and configure. An admin is appointed and can add users, block users and configure all the aspects of the system. The amount of storage is up to you and your budget. But it can be easy to handle and allow for expansion to a cloud drive or even to add extra space at the NAS unit itself.

Remember the biggest asset to any business is data and the importance of data and how easy it is to access it and collaborate using it is important.

So if you are considering storage and where it all goes?

It’s a Hard drive now a days.

computer harddriveI am asked by a lot of people about the new SSD drives as they call them, (In fact, this type of storage has been around for a while, granted it is developing and getting smarter and better all the time.), However, I digress. They ask me if the guarantee on this type of storage is as good as the older platter hard drives that stored their data to a physical disk using magnetism.

Well, there are many factors that affect both types of storage and cause them to fail or basically run out of life.

I stumbled across an article by CNet and they explain the way both drives work and how the SSD drive is much more complicated but in essence with last much longer. They are some actions you can do to help this but don’t panic you really don’t need to do them.

Check out the article here. (All credits here to Cnet.)

SSD or Platter Hard Drives

Let me know your thoughts on storage and your preferred drive type.

 

Is It Clouding my Judgement………?

cloud storage

As I was sitting at my office window and gazing at the sky, which unfortunately is more times grey than blue, I started to think about the shapes of clouds out there and obviously then being a geek my mind was drawn to cloud computing and all things to do with it.

I have trodden the boards of the IT stage for a number of years now, and it’s always fresh as new development is always on the horizon. The use of the term cloud has always seemed to have been thought up as a throwaway term by some marketing executive or journalist at some point, and has then just stuck with us. In practice – it is simply the Internet to most people, which has been around for many years. Of course, for some of us, the connection has been not too reliable, and it has occasionally been almost impossible to connect to over the years. But basically it all boils down to areas of storage on the Internet where data and websites live and we can all marvel at their content.

It is amazing how it has changed the world’s habits over the short time it has been around. We work there, shop there, talk there, and then we spend a disproportionate amount of our free time there.

Of course things have developed over the years, and we are now able to connect much more easily. In fact when our Internet connection goes down we are sometimes at a loss, all we have and do is attached to it. That feeling of your right arm being cut off … second only to those times when you misplace your phone…

However, I digress, what about this cloud thing. Well I suppose the natural extension to the Internet and surfing web pages is the fact we can put most, if not all, of our lives up on the Internet. It’s then stored on servers sited all around the world, thankfully not in an actual cloud. Although a friend of mine recently told me that his elderly mother had reasoned that this is why the weather is deteriorating, we are putting far too much stuff up in the clouds … an interesting thought.

Cloud storage has become a big thing, and also of course cloud based applications. Both allow mobile devices to carry out what seems to be very complex work, when in fact they are merely displaying it and the work is being done elsewhere.

Companies are now letting us sign up for free online storage space. When we upload data to it,  it can be seen from any handheld connected device we have; we can also share it with others more easily. This all sounds good, and in the opinion of many it is the way ahead. Sceptics have worries about security, who has access and who actually owns your data? What happens if the the server is down and you can’t access your data? All these are reasonable questions and need to be answered, and the cloud is not necessarily the best option for everyone. It may even only be a supplementary solution for some people and companies.

My personal experience has involved using it for storing various documents and information that I may want whilst out and about. There is nothing worse than being somewhere and remembering that the file you want is on your storage at home or office. In the past I used to email myself things, and when out and about if I could access my email account I could retrieve the data. Then came pen drives and I could carry vast amounts of data around in my pocket on something no bigger than a postage stamp. Think of the security risk with that, there have already been a few red faces from such items being left unattended.

With regard to the best cloud storage solution out there, that varies depending on who you speak to. In a lot of cases people have simply stuck with the first one they tried.

I can really only talk about Google Drive and the use of Google Drive and Google Apps. I have used them for some time and found them to be exactly what I need, allowing me to access data from my PC at the office, my Laptop at home and my phone and tablet as I travel. All are working on the same document held in the cloud so there are no duplicates or multiple versions. Google Drive also lets you share documents and I have worked with documents in situations where they were getting updated by a number of people simultaneously. The usability of the Google Apps side I always feel could be much improved, but then I am a Microsoft Office trainer and always use that as a measuring stick I am afraid.

Other offerings out there are many and more are arriving every day, such as Microsoft’s Sky Drive, Dropbox, Justcloud, Live drive, Apples Icloud and many more.

Which is best for you? Well it is difficult to choose, some people choose because of the space they are given, others because they thought they would give it a try and have just stayed there. I chose because I had tried Google Apps and found them an interesting start to online applications. Then I wanted to share files and found that Google would allow me to edit files as well as share them. I then started to get into Android, Google’s mobile operating system, and my account simply and seamlessly joined together and everything worked everywhere. What else did I need?

I hope this explains the move from the hard drive in your machine to the cloud. The use of it will only increase, driven by the 4G network expanding and access to the Internet becoming faster and more available. You may have to jump to a cloud at one point, so check it out – there is loads of information about it out there … where?

In the cloud of course…

Ian Thomson
Consultant at
IT Turning Point