Considering a FS3410 for a small office of 15 to 20 users. This is a small custom wood working operation where 3 or 4 of the employees draw plans using Fusion 360. I’m hoping I can use the 3410 to be able to handle the following:
Backup services for 20 or so users
Surveillance station for 6 cameras to start, maybe more in the near future
Small VDI implementation for VMs for the guys that draw use, so these VMs would include Fusion on them
Performance demands. This is Fusion 360 drawing custom wood plans, not Solidworks drawing detailed jet engine components, so the workload is much lighter than a typical CAD implementation.
Will this be enough horsepower with some future proofing? I’ve looked at entry level SAN units and they are going to be significantly more expensive. Hoping to be good stewards of the companies cash here.
I don’t recommend using Surveilance station on the same system running critical business apps. Having the VM’s run inside of Synoloy is slow and the interface is not that great compared to other hypervisors. The Synology does make a good storage target for XCP-NG and VMWare servers.
The VM use was my big concern there, thanks for letting me know about that. They have some smaller Synology devices that can be used for the Surveillance station. Would any of the TrueNAS enterprise products be better for running the VMs?
Ultimately, it depends on your needs and your workload. But if you want to use one box for all tasks, you are usually gonna make certain trade offs on one end or the other. TrueNAS and Synology are primarily storage systems, with additional features that might satisfy your needs for hosting VMs and applications, but probably won’t in many cases.
If you plan to run a lot of VMs, I would use a separate server and run a dedicated virtualization platform like Proxmox or XCP-NG on it. In addition to that you could run a less powerful NAS box for storing VM backups and maybe also to provide additional data storage for some of your VMs.
If you mainly need a lot of storage space and you only plan to run a few VMs or containers for a few specific and rather lightweight tasks, then TrueNAS or Synology may be sufficient for that. But be aware that you still gonna need a separate box to back things up to. Snapshots or backups stored on the same box that runs all the applications and also holds all the data are not real backups.