New Unraid Server Setup

[thunderclap]

I run an Unraid server at home which I love. It's easy to use and maintain and I really appreciate the piece of mind of redundancy. I am now considering building an Unraid server for my employer, but before I get to what I'm thinking, here's a brief preamble as to why...

 

I work for a government entity where getting anything ordered or approved is a nightmare. Six years ago I was told by my supervisor we needed a some way of tagging photos and for easy searching. Unfortunately, IT refused to help because "it isn't in our contract." So it fell to me to find a solution that satisfied my bosses wishes and, on a selfish level, made my job easier. I settled on ResourceSpace and after some griping from IT, they agreed to allow us to use it as long as we purchased a department server and maintained it ourselves. Not a big deal to me, since I've been building systems for 30 years. But we had to use the server they selected, a Dell Precision because it had a Raid controller for mirroring.

 

Once we got it I promptly installed Ubuntu and got our digital asset manager up and running. Within a few years I expanded it with a couple external drives for video/photo editing, which is my primary responsibility. The reason for this was because there are two of us editors, and two machines, and we were tired of having projects on two different machines, especially if there was a rush and we needed access to a project the other was working on. This set up worked fine for us... until now.

 

We suffered a major hard drive crash last week and the main drive no longer boots or is accessible. No problem, I thought, and pulled the drive out and moved the mirror drive. Turns out it had stopped mirroring the main drive in March 2022, so a lot of photos and b-roll is missing. Slightly panicked, I figured this was bad but not terrible because we have cloud backup.

 

Turns out that IT decided to block all cloud storage access even though we'd been authorized for it, and none of our data had been backed up since May 2022.

 

At this point I felt like I was a part of a disaster: fail safes in place and each one failed. Which is where I am now.

 

Since I've had such good success with Unraid for a personal server, I thought it might be a good option for work. Here is what I'm thinking; please let me know if any of this is a really bad idea. Please keep in mind I've gotten approval from my boss to build a system myself and go around IT.

 

Build a system with Intel Core i-9 12900k, 32GB RAM, 2 4TB SSD for cache, 8TB parity, and an array made up of an 8TB drive and 2 4TB drives. (Drives are a combo of new drives purchased to get the old system up and running and drives purchased for video editing last year.)

 

Since there is no ResourceSpace docker I will create an Ubuntu VM and install it there. Shares will be created in Unraid for photos and b-roll which I will share with the VM and that's where anything added to ResourceSpace will go. The cache drives will be configured for RAID-1 and be used primarily for our current editing projects. Once completed, they will be offloaded to the array.

 

I know I've seen some comments regarding using Unraid storage as an editing drive, but the tests I've run on my personal Unraid system seem to work fine, so I don't think there should be any major issues.

 

I hope I'm not forgetting anything and it all makes sense. Is there anything I'm forgetting or not considering? Are there any issues that might cause a problem I'm not thinking of?

[JonathanM]

What is your seniority in the project? If you leave, what will happen to the tech?

 

My normal response to someone wanting to use Unraid in a business setting is to discourage it unless the person doing the asking, building, and maintaining is a principal in the company, better yet an owner, preferably a single owner, not a partnership.

 

Unraid is great if you are willing to maintain and babysit, not so much if it's going to be set in place and ignored for years.

 

If your supervisor is fine with you being the ONLY person responsible, fine, I guess. I just don't want to put Unraid in the position of being the bad guy when you move on to another project.