NAS drive at work - is it possible

Over the next few years I'll need to store about 2-3 Terrabytes of videos on our work departments server. It was suggested to me I'd be best purchasing a NAS server to store the videos so it doesn't fill up our server. I mistakenly thought I could use it as a portable hard drive but evidently not.

I called my IT department and requested they install it but they said it's not possible to install as it wouldn't be possible to connect me to the works network and the NAS server.

I have no particular knowledge of IT but I can smell horse shit and I think they're just trying to fob me off. To give you an idea it took them 18 months for them to install a PC for me that wasn't connected to the network as I needed it to connect to some GPRS equipment I have out in the field. They continually told me it wasn't possible but when I realised they were just too lazy to install it they soon got of their arses.

So is it possible to connect a PC to a works server and a a personal NAS drive?

Yes

The NAS would be connected to the existing network and would be mapped as a network drive to your PC. It would have user accounts with password protection to prevent others on the network from accessing it. That's the simple setup that any normal network would allow, VLANs could be used to isolate it from other users but by the sounds of it they wouldn't know what a VLAN was, password protection would suffice.

Yes mate, we have half a dozen NAS drives here that we use, all we needed to do was register the MAC address of each one and then map a drive from your local machine to the NAS shares, its really simple to setup

Pretty much anything is possible as long as you got the budget to do it,
Do you take your field laptop into the office and want to download the data there or over a VPN conncetion into work?

You haven't said how big your company is but I would imagine they already has a NAS or a SAN as any accounting data should be on a resilient platform at least?
What level of criticality is this data as this will determine the sort of NAS needed, will this also need backing up "Off-Site" in case of the site catches fire etc?

The video files consist of traffic video surveys. We use the data to add to transport modelling programs to get an idea what the traffic is doing. The video's are stored from the camera on to an SD card. I then transfer the video on to my network drive. A typical survey takes about 9GB of data in mp4 format. We need to store the data for a minimum of 3 years by which time the data will be obsolete and we have to carry out a new survey.

I work for my local council.

There's one guy who works in IT is notoriously lazy and constantly ignores service call requests. He told me it wasn't possible and used technobabble but I suspect he was bull shitting me. It appears I was correct.

Thanks for your help guys.

If council then they will have the infrastructure already in place for this request, would imagine they have a large SAN to which all data is saved to so just a matter of letting you have a slice of that big pie for storing these files.

Some guy from IT called me today in response to my email to them a few days ago informing them there was only 7GB left on our 1.2TB network drive. I found it strange that IT hadn't picked up on this.

He said he had allocated some more space for these surveys and sent me a short-cut to it. I assume this was a SAN whatever that is?

I might not need this NAS drive then after all. I might try and sneak it home :wink2:

The council only got 1.2TB drive? I got 5TB's in my Microserver at home mate, think you need to talk to someone a little higher up the tree dude ;-)

I assume he means 1.2TB of the SAN was allocated to this project and he upped the storage as a result of it running low on free space. But with the council who knows...

Not the whole council mate lol. Just my wee department.