Ask HN: Best data storage strategy for SMB

1 points by julesie 6 years ago | 2 comments

What is the current go to data strategy if you are too big for Dropbox but not yet enterprise level?

We are a fast growing architectural design studio. We’re currently about 60 designers mainly co-located but with some remote workers and people often work from home.

The designers are mainly working with CAD and increasingly Point Cloud files. Often with multiple people accessing the same files in short periods of time.

Up until now we have been using Dropbox but it is driving the team insane. Sync speed, lack of file locking, clunkiness of selective sync and conflicted copies being the biggest challenges.

We have a web dev engineering team but no one with deep data storage knowledge.

This feels like a common situation for small to medium sized business. How has your company handled it?

- Stick with Dropbox? - Set up your own data center? - Outsource it to a local data specialist? - Use enterprise cloud vendor? - Something else entirely?

We are willing to spend money on the right solution but just currently unsure what that is.

sbuk 6 years ago |

I looked into this about 3 years ago. Architectural firms are in a unique position - they generally have SMB requirements for the majority of their needs, except data storage. I had ~24Tb of data, ~18Tb of which were Revit/AutoCAD files. Cloud solutions were just horrifically expensive or just couldn’t handle the volume of data. De-duplication is a must, as is regular scavenging of app generated backup files.

That said, StorSimple and Azure looks like it’s matured enough to look at now. The main potentially prohibitive factor being cost. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storsimple/

Edit; this has got me thinking about how awful model syncing it Revit is! A big part of the problem for me was that the only solution for syncing was local data storage. Remote working with Revit was a nightmare.

db48x 6 years ago |

https://www.freenas.org/freenas-certified-servers/