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The top selling CTACS book - Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials Installation Guide for Small Businesses - is now available in a 5th edition. It has been comprehensively updated, with additional sections, numerous enhancements, plus improved illustrations and screenshots. It covers everything you need to know when setting up an Essentials network, including connecting the computers, remote access, backups, working with Dropbox, Office 365 integration and much, much more. It is available exclusively here:
Amazon UK Amazon USA The increasing popularity of network attached storage (NAS) has encouraged drive manufacturers to produce hard drives designed especially for them. Although most standard drives will work quite well, there are some special considerations that NAS-aware drives are designed to address. Specifically, they are designed for 24x7x365 operation, have less noise and vibration, use less power and generate less heat. They also have special firmware to copy with error conditions. The best known NAS drives are the Red series from Western Digital (WD). These are available in both 2.5" and 3.5" form factors and in capacities of up to 4TB. Whilst around 15% more expensive than conventional drives, this additional expenditure is well worthwhile given the importance of data in a NAS box. WD now have a complete range of 'coloured' drives. The standard, everyday ones for desktops and laptops are WD Blue. For low energy usage (with slightly reduced performance) there are WD Green drives. For high performance and reliability in file servers, WD Black. For video surveillance and CCTV, WD Purple. Plus of course the WD Red drives mentioned above. Clearly WD do not believe in Henry Ford's famous maxim about the Model T car being available in any colour "as long as it's black"! Synology have introduced a new 'baby' NAS server, the DS414slim. It is the successor to the popular DS411slim, which was getting rather long in the tooth. The new model features more memory, USB 3.0 ports plus twin Ethernet adapters. The reason that the DS414slim is so small is that it uses 2.5" drives (as commonly found in laptops) rather than 3.5" ones (as commonly found in desktop computers). It can hold four of them and they can be configured as JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 5. At present, drives of up to 1.5TB capacity can be utilised, giving a total storage capacity of 6TB. The price of the DS414slim is expected to be around £250/US $350 for a bare unit. Synology have launched the EDS14, a new category of network attached storage (NAS). It is very petite - Synology describe it as 'palm sized' - has no moving parts and can be used in temperatures from -20C to 50C. Storage is provided is in the form of an SD card, supplemented with a plug-in USB drive if required. This combination of features makes it very suitable for use in industrial and other uses. The EDS14 first saw the light of day - sort of - about a year ago when the USB Station 3 was previewed. This was the supposed successor to the USB Station 2, a low-cost diskless unit that Synology introduced in 2010 and which is now showing its age. However, the USB Station 3 as such never materialised. The EDS14 (the 'E' is short for Embedded, by the way) is of higher specification than one might expect. It is based around a 1.2GHz Marvell Armada 370 processor with 512MB RAM. It also has twin Gigabit Ethernet ports. At present it runs the previous release of the DSM operating system, DSM 4.3. With a typical selling price of around £165 in the UK, the EDS14 is not exactly cheap. But it is undoubtedly an unusual and attractive niche product. Synology have released the latest version of DSM, the operating system for their extensive line of network attached storage (NAS) units. It features a brand-new look with the sort of clean, minimalist approach taken by Microsoft with Windows 8 and Apple with iO7. Whilst much of the changes are really refinements and improvements to existing functionality, there are some new features as well. For instance, Cloud Sync enables the DiskStation to synchronise information with popular cloud services such as Dropbox and Google Drive, which can provide a useful offsite backup facility for key data. Also, QuickConnect - Synology's method for providing easy remote access to the DiskStation without too much technical knowledge and configuration - has been significantly improved.
To find out more about DSM, go here. We are pleased to announce the publication of our new guide: 'Synology Setup Guide for Small Businesses'. It is a comprehensive, well written, fully illustrated book that takes you through all the steps involved in setting up a Synology NAS in a typical small business. It is available exclusively from Amazon Kindle by clicking here. Sometimes Microsoft ships operating systems that a lot of people don't like and which are widely perceived as being dogs. Examples that come rapidly to mind over the years are Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows Me. But sometimes they produce real gems that don't get the sales or publicity that they really deserve. One such product was Windows Home Server, which was withdrawn from retail sale on 31st December 2013 (but stocks are still available, so move quickly). Windows Home Server - WHS - started life in 2007 with an announcement at the CES show, although it was the best part of a year before it was readily available. It was based on a slightly cut-down version of Microsoft's then flagship server operating system, Windows Server 2003 R2, supplemented with a number of innovations to make it more useful and easier to use in a home environment. These included the Dashboard, providing at-a-glance status information and a simplified way to manage the system, and the highly-acclaimed Drive Extender. Usually on a Windows computer, each disk drive has its own letter to identify it. So, the first drive is C, the second is D, the third is E and so on. In a server environment there might be multiple drives; what Drive Extender did was transparently merge them all into one single pool. Add another drive and it became part of the pool, without any need to worry about whether it was G: or M: or whatever. Additionally, WHS would make multiple copies of files and store them on different drives, such that data would not be lost in the event of a drive failure, must like the way a RAID system operates. At the same time, HP announced a range of 'baby servers' running WHS. They were joined by a handful of other, smaller manufacturers, but it was painfully obvious even in the early days that there was no widespread support for this innovative product. A few years later, Microsoft released a follow-on product in the form of Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS 2011). In some ways this was more of the same, but updated to use grown-up Windows Server 2008 R2 and with additional polish. But - to the shock of enthusiasts and pundits - the innovative Drive Extender technology was gone. This time round HP did not launch a supporting server, and shortly afterwards pulled out of the market altogether. An even bigger shock took place in 2012 when Microsoft announced there would be no further editions of WHS. Instead, home users were pointed in the direction of Windows Server Essentials - at ten times the price... Retail sales of WHS 2011 would end on 31st December 2013, although the product would be supported until 2016. Intriguingly, manufacturers can still supply "embedded" versions until 2025, although none appear to have chosen to do so. Much of the technology pioneered in WHS has subsequently appeared in other Microsoft operating systems. For instance, the Dashboard appears in other server products and Drive Extender has re-appeared in Windows 8 under the name Storage Spaces. WHS failed for several reasons. Firstly, it was ahead of its time. There is now a proven market for home storage solutions, but it is satisfied by NAS products that are simple and easy to use. Secondly, because of its complexity, WHS appealed mainly to technical people and enthusiasts, who appreciated being able to purchase a "real" server operating system for a fraction of the normal price. And thirdly, Microsoft did not really put a lot of weight behind the product in terms of marketing. As stated at the beginning of this article, stocks of WHS 2011 are still available from the likes of eBuyer, CCLonline, Amazon and others. It costs between £35-£40. Some people are buying it not for use as a server, but for use as a general purpose operating system on a desktop or laptop. This is an attractive proposition for people who really do not like Windows 8 and are prepared to put in the effort to get it working. WHS 2007-2013. R.I.P. Solid State Drives - made from high performance flash memory - offer many advantages over conventional mechanical drives. For a start: they are a lot faster; they use less power; they are silent; they are immune to physical knocks. But, they are also considerably more expensive. Whereas a standard 500GB mechanical HDD for a laptop costs less than £40, the SSD equivalent is in the order of £250. This price will undoubtedly come down with time, but for now it means their usage has to be very selective. The WD Black2 comes nicely packaged, with software and a USB gizmo to help transfer the operating system and data from an existing drive. It is possible to level some criticisms: the SSD performance is not stellar, but of course vastly better than that of a HDD. The drive itself is 9.5mm thick, meaning it will fit many but not all laptops (some are restricted to 7mm drives). And it is pricey: at around £250 it is twice the price of buying separate SSD and HDD drives of the same capacity. Nevertheless, it is an intriguing option which opens up the benefits of both performance and capacity to laptop users. Presumably the price will eventually fail, and such drives We are proud to announce the release of an installation guide for the latest release of Microsoft's server operating system for small business, Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. Written from a real-world perspective and based upon years of experience, this beautifully written and illustrated guide takes you step-by-step through the installation of Essentials in a typical small business. It contains the equivalent of nearly 60 A4 pages: not too many, not too little, but just right! The guide is available exclusively from Amazon Kindle and can be found here. Dell have introduced a compact file server, the PowerEdge T20. Whilst not as petite as the HP Microserver or the Western Digital DS 5100/6100, it is nonetheless smaller than most entry level servers. Internally, it uses server grade components, meaning it is not just a souped-up PC masquerading as a server. The PowerEdge has a choice of Intel Pentium or Xeon processors, is expandable up to 32GB RAM, has four 3.5" drive bays plus can accommodate another two 2.5" drives via an expansion kit. Dell are aiming this server at the small office and the home-based office. No operating system is supplied, but a suitable offering would be Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. One shortcoming of the T20 is that it only has software-based RAID, which we would not recommend (see The World of Fake RAID). A number of pre-canned configurations are available from the Dell website. At the time of writing, a Xeon-based model with 2 x 1 TB SATA drives, 8GB RAM and a basic one year warranty costs £528 + VAT. Allow for a copy of Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials and some form of backup drive and you are looking at over £1000 for a working system. Whilst not outrageous, a Seagate Business NAS with 4TB storage and a backup drive is currently available (15/11/2013) from ebuyer for less than £200 and would provide sufficient functionality for many (see http://www.ebuyer.com/491331-seagate-4tb-business-storage-2-bay-nas-external-hdd-black-stbn4000200). |
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