NAS Enclosure - 5 PC Networked dental Office

[ibrahimuwc]

My wife (the dentist) and I (IT support) are about to open our first dental office ever! We have already bought a NAS enclosure which supports RAID 5 with four 1TB hard-drives, and 1TB external hard drive. We have also bought a 16 port Netgear Gigabyte Switch. We don't have any servers, but we want to have a centralized method to use OD and a reasonable backup system.

Simply put, can any one advise us on how to do this installation with the equipment we've got.

The NAS enclosure is: Thecus N4100PRO NAS Media Server - 4-Bay 3.5" SATA to USB 2.0, Dual Gigabit LAN, Multimedia Support, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, JBOD

The total number of windows XP Pro PCs: 5

We have also bought the Schick digital sensor and we're about to buy an Intra Oral camera.


Any advice or reference would be greatly appreciated.

[ibrahimuwc]

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ibrahim

[murmsk]

With 5 pc's there is no need for a dedicated server. Setup one of the pc's with mysql and use it as the server. It can be used as a workstation as well tho it is probably better to have one computer that is at least primarily used as a server. The other 4 setup as only a workstation.

I am not sure that you need the NAS. You could put all the data on it but I think OD runs faster if the data files are kept locally. You could backup to the NAS on a regular basis? What did you plan to use the NAS for?

I use a linux server with 12 computers and a NAS as a backup and central storage. I also use an offsite internet backup service.

steve

[ibrahimuwc]

I thought I can run the MySQL on the NAS as a servicea and directing all the other PCs to it for data storage/retrieval. Thus, utilizing the RIAD 5 configuration so I can have more than a single point of failure. Or is that not a correct assumption?

Would you please elaborate a bit more about how I would setup this network?
What is the best way to keep the data safe by using the NAS and maintaining high performace?

Thanks for your help.

[murmsk]

I am not sure you can run mysql on a NAS??? I think you could use the point mysql being run on a computer to the NAS for the data. Is this what you mean?

Why not do a RAID on the computer you want to use as a server , and use the NAS as a backup and central storage.

I have my server and backup every hour to a workstation setup as a potential server with the mysql service shut off. If ever happens in 5 minutes I can turn the service on and point all the workstations to the temporary server. the worst that happens is I loose an hour of input. every night I backup to mozy.com. This decreases the need for RAID.

I use mysqladministrator for hourly scheduled datadump backup. This is a free download from mysql. It puts all the data in 1 file. word of caution you have to redo the schedules with each OD upgrade in case new tables have been added.

One of the beauties of OD is that any computer can act as a server if needed.

There is no

[ibrahimuwc]

Your points are well taken.

Consider this scenario for a second: how can I install mysql on an xp machine while point the database files to the NAS?

I have post a new thread on this forum detailing the scenio.

Thank you.