Sage over NAS - anyone tried it?

[Durbs]

I'm fitting some new PC's for a client over the weekend, its a small satellite office with two guys and they have Sage installed on both machines, one guy accesses the Sage DB file via a share from the other chaps machine.

They have asked if there is a cheap way they can have it in a central location so Fred can still use it when Franks machine is not switched on.

I'd suggested the cheapest way was a simple £200+ NAS box (sure, low end servers are ultra cheap but factor in the Windows server OS and its more than they wanted to pay and is overkill really for their needs, am not interested in the hassle of setting up a Linux solution).

I've since seen postings suggesting that Sage doesn't function well from a NAS box - anyone tried it and are there any gotchas?

[b0redom]

Just do it properly:

HP ProLiant MicroServer Athlon II Neo N36L 1.3GHz 1GB.. | Ebuyer.com

If you REALLY want, you could try putting Openfiler/FreeNas on there to try first. I use the latter - but I know enough about BSD/ZFS to fix it if it breaks. Depends on how much of a headache you want.

[Durbs]

Just do it properly:

HP ProLiant MicroServer Athlon II Neo N36L 1.3GHz 1GB.. | Ebuyer.com

They look good but then its £300+ extra to stick Server 2008 on it. Don't fancy the Linux route as theres not much money in this one for installation so dont want to be messing around.

[eek]

The options are a cheap NAS or if you have some old hardware available unraid (Home ). The basic three disc version is free and that would be all you need. Dig up an old pc follow the installation instructions and you'll be up and running in 30 minutes.

If you have to buy the hardware you can do it for £150 or so all in

Scan.co.uk: Thecus N0204 miniNAS 2 x 2.5" SATA HDD 10/1000 Lan, USB2, PC/MAC/Linux

and two of these

Scan.co.uk: Samsung Spinpoint M7 500GB 2.5" Notebook Hard Drive - HM500JI

is probably the cheapest 500gb raid 1 nas you can find.

[ee61re]

I have a customer that has the Sage backend on a windows fileserver, which works fine - the clients are configured to access it using a mapped drive (rather than a UNC path), although it might work using UNC, but I've never tried.

I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work on a NAS device, cheap or otherwise.

[vetran]

SAGE mapped version is a nightmare over wan.

[eek]

SAGE mapped version is a nightmare over wan.

The thing is that its already over wan for one of the machines. Reading the bits online about the problems I think the issue may be less to do with wan and more to do with how Windows Vista and 7 handle network shares (badly).

[Durbs]

I have a customer that has the Sage backend on a windows fileserver, which works fine - the clients are configured to access it using a mapped drive (rather than a UNC path), although it might work using UNC, but I've never tried.

I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work on a NAS device, cheap or otherwise.

Have read that using a UNC rather than a mapped drive can have a 50% performance hit for some reason with Sage!

I too couldn't see why it wouldnt work fine but have now seen tons of posts from people complaining about its performance on NAS. They currently use it from one PC over the network reading the company file on the other machine so surely a NAS would just be the same, but seems not?

My own experience of NAS is pretty bad though, the one i've got at home takes 10x longer to copy anything than the low end Windows server that sits beside it.

The client have a Sage support package so going to talk to Sage themselves and see what they recommend.

[stek]

Have you considered iSCSI?

[doodab]

Cheap NAS devices have very little memory for caching.