ss202sl said:
It depends on the speed of your network, and how much load is already on it. If you have a fast network with a lot of free bandwidth, putting the NAS on it may not be a terrible thing. If you have a slow network, or are already using a lot of bandwidth, then you probably want to isolate the NAS to it's own network and avoid saturating your network.
Also there are NAS devices that allow you to create shares right on the NAS itself, so you don't have to connect it to an intermediary server. Just attach the NAS to the network, create the shares, set permissions(many use LDAP connections) and you're done.
As I mentioned, I'd rather not got the pure NAS route due to their inflexibility. This is for a busy office with quite complex data needs. It's not the only data store on the system and there's a fair bit of Active Directory group policy stuff that doesn't translate well to *nix boxes. The two styles of security are not the same and in many cases aren't compatible (eg file encryption). Also, I want to centralise all management to one system and their backup/versioning/archiving/rollback needs to be extremely flexible, something which our current NAS boxes can't come close to managing.
It's going to need to be either a proper fileserver or iSCSI SAN to be able to manage the complexity of stuff we need it to do. I'm leaning towards a proper fileserver but if there's not a massive performance with iSCSI, I'm willing to give that a try.
We've got 100MB fibre internet link, Cat6 cabling and semi managed 1GB switch (with link aggregation) so we're already a step above most SOHO gear and we're prepared to upgrade the switch to an enterprise grade one if we have to.