Can I have a separate NAS and application server?

[jozeftierney]

We're a small engineering firm currently keeping our data on a NAS (DS410) and we just purchased Solidworks PDM so we've begun the process of designing and setting up a server to run it as it's server based.

Could we make a server for the application and have the NAS for storage (we'd likely buy a newer NAS if we went this route) or should we drop the NAS to run a file server/application server combo? or is even that a bad idea and we should use seperate servers for file storage and applications?

We'll only have up to 8 people working of the server at a time.

 

[kanewolf]

If the server processing has to access data, it will be faster if the data is locally stored. I would get a NAS to backup everything. You should also use some type of off-site backups. That could be a cloud backup or it could be a set of USB drives that one or more employees take home with them.

 

[bill001g]

This more depends on the application which I know nothing about. In general there is not a limitation on where you data resides. What makes the difference is how important disk access is to the application. There is always added delay when you add the overhead of a network compared to accessing the drives directly inside the server. It depends if this added delay will impact the application.

This would be even more complex if you had multiple servers that needed access.

My guess would be using a single server for both the application and the data sharing likely would be the cheapest and fastest solution. The file sharing function put very little load on a server so your application server should be able to act as your "NAS" for the end users.

You could always move it to a nas later, in most cases you could just remove the data storage drives from the server and put them in the nas if you really wanted to.

 

[failboat]

File transfers don't need a lot of cpu resources. So those boxes are usually built for low power and stability.

You will need to look through the docs for the application you want in order to spec it out.