Correct storage setup for a print company

[nidur]

What in your opinion would be the ideal storage setup for a print company.

There needs to be one shared folder for the projects for mac's and pc's, 10-15 connections at a time.
So we are talking mostly speeds but reliability, this shared folder will be backed up nightly to another fileserver.

Around 4 TB disk space needed.

 

[Ericloewe]

What speeds are we talking about? Anything goes (almost) for GbE and file serving, but you'll need to plan things carefully if you need more.

 

[nidur]

Atleast 2 nic's preferably 4 to the network.

We are talking about files mostly in the <100mb range

Is 200MB read/write scenario asking for much, I was thinking to set up 6 disks as a 3 mirrored vdevs striped.

 

[Ericloewe]

Atleast 2 nic's preferably 4 to the network.

We are talking about files mostly in the <100mb range

Is 200MB read/write scenario asking for much, I was thinking to set up 6 disks as a 3 mirrored vdevs striped.

Your case is a bit at the edge of what is Link Aggregation territory, but it should be worth the trouble for 10-15 connections.

In any case, 3 mirrored vdevs (I'm assuming regular desktop drives or better) should be fine, maybe even overkill (depends on your IOPS needs). Maybe you could even get away with a single RAIDZ2 vdev, again, depending on the specific workload. 200MB/s is not a problem for single users even with single RAIDZ3 vdevs, so three vdevs should behave nicely with a couple of users. Maybe someone will have some numbers to share that are from a similar situation to yours.

 

[nidur]

Thanks for the reply's Eric