I work for a Small Business Planning, Architectural and engineering company. We do construction design work, autocad, adobe indesign, with 5 or 6 remote users when covid19 thing Goes away. We have 20TB space with Raid 5 config. Another Synology nas offsite with raid 6 as a backup storage of initial NAS. Right now, we have 25 users and looking to grow in a year or two to 45 users as we ramp up design work. We have DS1515+ for our file storage and users working off the mapped drives. We use Active backup for Synology for backup and restore of computes. We have 20TB space with Raid 5 config.
For the network setup we have ISP modem>Sonicwall TZ-350>netgear unmanaged switches>User workstations. For the remote work we use openvpn that runs on Synology.
I am looking into 50TB setup and additional space for backups of our files in case something goes wrong.
Looking for recommendations on rack mounted server hardware and software to manage files systems, easy backup and restore of the work machines. Not looking to go to flash storage due to cost. In Synology we are using Seagate ironwolf pro drives. Also, with that many users, I believe the network hardware needs upgrade too.
The Synology SA Series offers some rack mounted option and it sounds like you are already familiar with their software setup. We use a lot of their systems for small business setups.
What’s your budget?
As far as your network goes;
Sounds like a couple of 48 port 10/100/1000 switches would cover you maybe with some sfp+ ports to go 10gb to the servers / nas as an option. Go for POE as well then you have phones and access points covered. The HP/Aruba 2540’s are a solid option (2540-48g-PoE±4SFP+) or Ubiquiti obviously (US‑48‑500W or USW-Pro-48-POE). The USW-Pro-48-POE also now gives some L3 options but I don’t have one to play with so not sure how much or how good.
50 ish machines should be ok on one broadcast domain so you probably don’t need to worry about vlans for that although it’s worth thinking about to isolate printers / plotters, none “work” devices (personal phones), SIP/VOIP. Separate vlan for backup traffic as well maybe.
The architects that I work with tend to copy the files locally whilst they work to avoid network latency.
If the Sonicwall is working ok then leave it be but maybe swap it out for one of the Netgate boxes.