About a year ago we were facing a serious problem of storage. As amateur photographers we want to store the RAW photo along with the fully rendered JPG. Obviously the problem is with the two combined it can easily consume 10-12MB per photo, which adds up very quickly. Previously, the solution was to just buy larger drives for our primary file-server and migrate the data over. With the ever-increasing size this was becoming less and less practical, not to mention costly in terms of finances and time. I also hated the idea of a single file-server that for any reason could fail possibly damaging our data and requiring even more time to repair. We began to play with ESXi (as it was now free) as a means to virtualize all of our home servers that would enable us to better manage the systems and offer a better solution towards fault tolerance. The only problem was, do we really want to virtualize a system holding ~500GB of data?

Obviously no. So the solution was clear, construct a home SAN (storage area networking) or technically a NAS (network-attached storage).

I wanted a system that could hold a large amount of data, plus be scalable enough to support growth without the need to constantly migrate data from one array to another. The solution was using the open-source SAN solution OpenFiler. This offered us a very simple way to scale-up the capacity by growing the RAID array with new drives and resizing the necessary volumes. No more transferring data around and buying all new sets of drives.

I chose to have my guests that needed the increased space to connect via iSCSI to the SAN which offered me the most flexibility and network fault tolerance. OpenFiler supports many other sharing methods including NFS and SMB, which were appealing, but I wanted to have gating control over access on my file server and not the SAN.

This solution has been working great for well over a year now, and I would strongly recommend this form of solution. With the ease of media development, and the ever-increasing ease of media presentation within the home, building a centralized file-server makes more sense now than ever. Rather than putting a large drive or two in your system, you can consider using a SAN to offer better scalability.