File Server Best Practices — Synology Webinar

welcome and thanks for joining me for another Synology solutions seminar my name is Chris Alden and I'm a part of the Synology America team today we're going to be going over best practices in regards to business file server deployment so let's dive in when you're deploying a business file server there are a few things that you're going to want to take into consideration first however your users going to be accessing the server and their data second we have to assess the environment your server will be in and what requirements that needs the hit third how was your server going to integrate into this environment and what tools are you going to need last let's consider any IT self services you may want to implement to lessen the workload on your IT administration so first we're going to discuss access types now there are a multitude of ways to access a server however we'll be going over two of the most common a map network drive will allow you to share files locally on your network and collaborate with other people now this is ideal for office environments where files need to be accessed by many users synchronization will allow for your now is to act as a cloud where you can access data from anywhere with an internet connection and then download these files for offline use let's actually take a quick look at both of these in action mapping and network drive is actually incredibly easy I'll demonstrate that right now here we are in our standard Windows 10 environment although you can do this from Mac and Linux as well I'll click on our Windows Explorer here at the bottom and then I'll go under this PC on the left side this is where I can see Network locations and attached devices up here at the top I'll click on map network drive now I'll select which drive this will appear as in this case I'll leave it as Z here I'll enter the IP address of mine s and the folder I wish to access on it in this case documents then I'll hit finish now it'll ask me to log in with my credentials for the Nazz now as you can see I'm connected to my documents folder every single one of these files is on mine as I can see it here on the tree under this PC as well another way to do this and access my folders or any folders on mine as would be utilize Synology Drive so here on my desktop I have this Drive folder once I open this up I can see My Documents folder as it is on mine s you'll also take notice of these green checkmarks what these indicate is that all of the files are currently synchronized with mine as having these files synchronized gives me the ability to make changes from anywhere with an internet connection as well as roll back to previous versions that had been synchronized previously in review a map network drive is ideal for team folders in an office setting all of the data is centralized however it is local network only so there is no offline editing with synchronization multiple devices can sync to your nas over the internet allowing for offline editing in real time versioning like I just showed you so when should we consider which option well ideally you could actually combine these you could utilize a map network drive for team folders and collaboration anything that you could share in the office or have multiple teams working on you could then use Synology drive for home folders and other users specific files for access off of that local network essentially anything you may want to bring with you and work on outside of the office next let's talk about assessing your environment and how to choose and as for its requirements first let's figure out the number of bays we should be looking for so to figure this out let's start by thinking of the capacity that we're looking for how many terabytes of storage do I need once I've got that estimated I need to consider what raid type I should use typically four six bays and below I would choose raid five but for more than six Bay's I would choose raid six since more drives typically comes with a greater chance of disk failure so more protection is always preferred now that we've decided capacity and raid type we've almost figured out how many bays we need however let's say our target is 24 terabytes usable are a ton of ways to do this is we could utilize 7 4 terabyte drives or even 3 12 terabyte drives and several options in between so we'll have to consider disk performance for example let's say that a single discs performance is around 100 megabytes a second if we were to utilize 4 disks now our performance is sitting around 400 megabytes a second and if we put that in a raid 5 we'd see around 300 megabytes a second more disks typically correlates to higher performance speeds so take that into account when you're building this out the second item to consider is how many users will be accessing your nas to determine the performance per user in the bandwidth that you'll need we can use a simple calculation let's divide the performance number by the amount of users and you'll get a rough performance that each user will experience so for instance let's start with a connection speed of 125 megabytes a second 125 megabytes a second divided by 20 users means each user will experience about 6.25 megabytes a second add more users and that number starts to go down so how can we increase these network speeds well let's think about increasing your network bandwidth you can utilize either link aggregation or 10 gig connection figuring out your bandwidth requirements will help dictate which units you're going to be considering it's also good to keep in mind that the more users you have the more RAM you're going to need however how much RAM you'll need is also dictated on what applications you'll be running so we'll cover that in a moment now that we know how many bays we need the performance requirement and how many LAN ports we're looking at let's consider what file types are going to be at play here file types affect performance for instance as your server hosting small files such as documents or PDFs or are you going to be moving larger files such as uncompressed video or raw photos smaller files will typically require a higher end CPU also having multiple concurrent users accessing these folders and files creates random access which again will change what now as you'll be considering as you'll need something with high performance and more RAM expandability you can also look into running an SSD cache or going with an off solution with an SSD cache you can create a small amount of hot data for better random access however you could always consider an all flash solution for the best random access across all of your data especially useful if the server will primarily be a virtual machine host last on our list let's consider which applications your nas will be running will this be used as virtual machine storage a company mail server or private cloud there's tons of use cases so consider if yours requires hire random access or high-performing CPU are you going to have any specific encryption needs you can encrypt and protect your data every step of the way in rest and in transit but this can be a CPU intensive process will you be utilizing any platform dependent technologies such as Synology high availability or btrfs snapshots all of these options will dictate the class of unit that you'll be looking to purchase if you're looking to implement all of these you may want to consider a higher functioning unit now Synology offers a wide range of products to suit all of your needs for business file servers we often see our value series our plus series and our XS and XS plus series essentially appear a small office with a small team of a dozen people that need a data server a larger company with a hundred employees accessing and storing files or a global company with virtual machines and massive storage needs we've got you covered now let's discuss how easy it is to integrate your file server into your business environment we're gonna talk about how to join a Windows domain or create your own how to install software on hundreds to thousands of pcs and some helpful configuration tips to keep that data secure so first let's talk about Active Directory your server will seamlessly integrate into your Microsoft Active Directory however if you do wish to step away from Windows Server and it's $50 per user licensing fees we offer Synology Active Directory now this is a robust solution that allows you to automatically map the network drive deploy software to all users on your domain and manage group policies via our set all without any licensing or any additional fees take a look at this so here we are back in DSM and I wanted to quickly show you how easy it is to connect a user to your domain and have a automatically map network drive upon their initial login I want to start with going up here to the upper left hand corner and clicking in the main menu and then click on the Active Directory server application now again this is 1st party software that is available for free on our package Center as you can see here I've already created a domain for the purpose of this demonstration and what we want to do is add a user to it so I'll scroll over here to users and computers and click on that tab here I can see all of the users and groups on my domain currently and here under user I'll click add up at the top then click on user you can also add groups this way as well so now we'll enter our users login name I'll choose Chris I can enter a description and an email but I'm just going to enter a strong password you can change a few rules here as well too but I'll keep it simple and go on to the next page now here you can see all of the groups that my user has the potential to join I'll just scroll down and he's just going to join the all domain users group automatically and I'll leave it at that click Next and then you can review everything you just went over and then apply it so now what we're gonna do is extend this naming field scroll down and find Chris I'll click on Chris and then I'll go up to action and edit now in this menu it can change anything I want about is account but what I want to do is click on the profile tab and then add a login script so here I'll upload the login script that I've created here I've written a really simple map network drive script so I'll click on that and then hit open just so we're on the same page I'll show you what the script looks like as you can see here it's one simple line of code and it just shows the address of my server the folder I want the user to access and how will appear to the user in this case it'll appear as an S Drive after I've done that I'll simply click OK now the last step of this process is I have to make sure that Chris has access to that Documents folder I'm trying to map them too so I'll click out of this and then I'll go over to my control panel in my control panel I'll click on shared folder now here I can see the Documents folder I'll click on that and I'll go up to the top and click Edit here I can change all of the rules about this folder but what I want to do is go to permissions now here we see there's only admin and guests but where it says local users actually want to click this drop down menu and scroll down to domain users now here if I extend this naming field out I can see Chris is right here and I can give him read and write access I'll click OK and now let's hop into our virtual machine and check how we did there here we are logging into our virtual machine for the very first time so I'll enter Chris's name and then his password and I'll log in now since this is the very first time we're logging into this virtual machine Windows has to set up so let's fast forward a bit and I'll talk to you in a second perfect so first things first I'll open up my Windows Explorer here and click on this PC now as soon as I do this you can see that the Documents folder was automatically mapped and I have access to everything inside of it nice and easy let's go back to the presentation now let's move on to our security checklist as protecting your data is incredibly important and often overlooked first on the system security level we suggest that you subscribe to Synology e-news now this is a free bulletin with the latest information on security patches and protocol to make sure that you're doing all you can to protect your data you can subscribe upon initially setting up your unit or at any point later on by simply logging in to your Synology account and opting in you should set up system notifications right away to keep on top of any and all changes in your server from suspicious login attempts to a defunct fan that might need replacement you can always set up a UPS to prevent data loss in case of any unforeseen power failures you should also consider scheduling smart testing now this will scan all of the discs on your nas and search for any potential problems before they even occur next on the network security level you can enable your nas to automatically block any for too many failed login attempts which is especially useful to protect yourself from BOTS attacks trying to access your servers you can utilize our let's encrypt service to provide you with a free SSL certificate you can also encrypt all of your network traffic by utilizing HTTPS only using all of these in tandem is highly recommended on the user security level you can enable a file transfer log to keep track of every file movement on your system for future auditing you should implement strong password rules and 2-step authentication to make sure that all logins are secure you can also enable and tailor the security adviser to scan your nas for any weak user password configurations all two rules that you set in place lastly you should definitely utilize antivirus software such as our antivirus essential or McAfee Antivirus now let's talk on Central Management so let's say that you have anywhere from a couple dozen nas units spread between some local offices to a couple hundred or thousands spread across the entire globe instead of visiting each location or entrusting each one of these to a local admin you may want to implement our central management system now this will allow you to manage a multitude of servers from one host enabling centralized monitoring of all of those units and their logs mask configuration system notifications updates and software deployments throughout your whole organization now finally let's consider some IT self-service policies that we could put into effect a lot of IT teams are stretched thin as it is so allowing for some of these daily requests from users to be handled by the users can alleviate a lot of these issues and a lot of unnecessary work first let's consider allowing users to reset their passwords on their own and recover files without having an admin step in utilizing either a simple recycle bin or snapshots of the files to be rolled back to next you could allow for file sharing and file uploads with third parties without having to give them direct access to your nas by providing them with a login or moving files to the third party service or an external drive let's start with the password recovery via email setup that we just discussed first we'll open up our control panel again and then we'll go to user up at the top we'll click on the Advanced tab and it's actually the very first option available allow non administrator users to reset forgotten passwords via email it can also apply a series of password strength rules including numeric characters special characters or even excluding common easily guest passwords if I scroll down I can enable password expiration to make sure that passwords are only valid for a certain duration additionally we can enable 2-step verification to make sure that our users and their data are as safe as possible next let's talk about file recovery let's set up a simple recycle bin on our share folder so that anyone connected to it as a map network drive can easily recover files that they may have accidentally deleted we'll go to the control panel again but this time we'll click on shared folder now we were utilizing your Documents folder so I'll click on that and then go up to the top and click Edit here in the first tab the general tab I can see at the bottom the option to enable recycle bin I can also restrict the access to administrators only or even set up a schedule to automatically empty the recycle bin at any days of my choosing I'll enable the recycle bin and then click OK now let's open up our map network drive through the windows Explorer and take a look at this in action let's say that somebody accidentally deleted our inventory sheet well no worries now I can just quickly access the recycle bin and see that it's right here now all I have to do is cut and paste it right back into the directory that it belongs in no problem let's say however that somebody went inside the inventory sheet and deleted everything then overrode the file leaving us with nothing how can we recover from this well let's take a quick look at snapshot utilizing our free snapshot replication package we can easily recover any files that may have accidentally been overwritten or deleted here we'll go up to our main menu and we'll click on the snapshot replication application once this is opened up I can see all of my scheduled snapshots and if I go over to the left side where it says snapshots this is where I can create them for any of my shared folders now here under snapshots I'll click on the documents folder and then I'll click on settings now here I can enable a snapshot schedule now let's say that I want to have this set to every day every 5 minutes all of the controls are pretty granular right now I'll set it to every 15 minutes I can also enable a retention policy can specify the number of snapshots I wish to retain I can always retain them or I can retain the snapshots with any policy that I want to dictate I'll enable it to always retain the snapshots and then I'll hit ok so now we can see that our Documents folder is scheduled to have snapshots taken every 15 minutes I'll exit out and we'll go take a look at this now I'll open up the folder here and let's say that somebody goes into the inventory opens it up and then promptly selects all and deletes everything after they deleted everything they went up to file and they saved now this file is completely overwritten and we've lost all of that data or have we what we can do now that snapshots are enabled is rollback to any of those previous snapshots and recover that file so I can right click on inventory and I can go down to restore previous versions now here I can see that I actually took a snapshot last week now I can open this up and I can see that all of my data is safe and secure I also have the option to restore this directly into place so I'll click on that hit restore and it'll notify me that this is successfully been restored now whenever I open this file I'll see that it's back the way it was completely in order lastly let me show you how to share send and receive files with a third party without having to give them direct access or login to your kness here we'll go to our file station now let's say we have to share our inventory with somebody outside of the office what I can do is right-click inventory and then scroll down to the bottom this menu and click on share now here I'm given a shared link what I can do is highlight this link and then copy it and actually just send it over now when somebody clicks on this link that I send them they're greeted with this a simple page that just has a download button to the sheet that I gave them access to it works much the same with receiving files as well so let's say that we need somebody to submit something to our accounting folder now what I can do is I right click on our accounting folder then I scroll down to the bottom and I click create file request now here it works exactly the same I'm given a link and then I'm given a name and I can write a simple message and even enable password protection so that the person asked to enter a password that I gave them before they can upload anything to mine as when they're given this link they're greeted with this page a simple upload portal that they can write their name and then put their file in and it will appear in the file dictated on - it's really that simple so in conclusion when you're deploying a business file server you need to consider how your users are accessing this data what environment you're deploying into and its particular requirements how you'll be integrating into that environment and lastly like I just showed you any IT self-service rules that you believe fit in with your particular use case thank you very much for watching if you have any particular questions about what we just went over please head over to Synology comm to learn more or contact us through the website thank you very much and have a great day

Channel: Synology

Views: 94,195

Keywords: Synology, Business Servers, NAS, DSM, Servers, PC, MAC, Business, Tutorial, Demonstration, NAS server, Hard Drive, RAID, File Server, synology active directory server, synology active backup for business, active backup for business synology

Id: eSE1Hpw7iyc

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 21 2018