Prinergy Backup/Storage Question

[MattG]

Hi all! Quick question...A while back we switched from Prinergy EVO to the latest version of Prinergy Connect and I was told that we needed to have a Backup/Storage unit since we can't archive jobs like we used to do on EVO. I was wrongly under the assumption that a good external drive would suffice but today I'm told that what we need is a storage NAS or SAN which of course is more expensive. I don't want to go cheap but I don't need overkill either. Can any of you give me any suggestions/recommendations on what is working for you? Thank you!

 

[Joe]

A good NAS or SAN is better than just any old external drive because of redundancy. If you have a NAS with four 2 TB drives one is used for the redundancy so you end up with 6 TB of actual storage space. If a drive goes bad you pop it out and pop a new one in and it rebuilds itself on the fly. No lost data or time. That is what we use in a Netgear ReadyNAS Pro. Just be sure to use Enterprise level drives and not the cheaper desktop drives as a RAID system puts more wear and tear on a drive. If you put a regular cheap desktop drive in a NAS it will fail quicker than an enterprise level drive.

 

[PricelineNegotiator]

This is a good place to start:

Buy one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06Y4VFRQP/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

And 5 of these:

https://www.amazon.com/Red-2TB-Hard...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=V3W8FQKMDETQ1P148V87

A GREAT system. I don't think you'll need anything more robust than this.

 

[MattG]

Thanks for the help guys! What about the diskless ones? Is that more of a risk?

 

[Joe]

A diskless NAS is a NAS that comes without hard drives that you have to purchase separately. On the type of hard drives, I'll stand by my earlier statement to be sure to use Enterprise level hard drives and I would bypass any hard drive that is 5400 RPM. I would use 7200 RPM drives minimum and preferably 10,000.

 

[PricelineNegotiator]

I think making that judgement is hard given that we really only know that he needs to back up one program. Matt, can you list your current situation in respects to number of users and average tasks involved in a day?

 

[Joe]

He clearly states he is wanting to do this for archiving Prinergy jobs. He was told, by Kodak I presume, "that a good external drive would suffice but today I'm told that what we need is a storage NAS or SAN". I'm sure he was told about the NAS or SAN for the reasons I mentioned, ie....redundancy. Which is why I mentioned Enterprise drives for a NAS because of the extra wear and tear on a drive by a RAID system. And 5400 RPM drives are usually used in laptops and cheap external drives while a RAID will perform better with 7200 or 10,000 RPM drives. But he can use a cheap external drive if wants to. It will work but if the drive ever dies he will lose all of the backed up jobs on it.

 

[scotts]

We have Prinergy Connect on a VM, which gets backed up to a Enterprise NAS, and all our jobs are backed up to a different Enterprise NAS as well. As others have said: REDUNDANCY. I've seen too many drives fail before their time, and the only way to be safe is redundancy.

 

[MattG]

So I now I look at my diskless question and think what an idiot I must sound like! Anyways....when we were using Prinergy EVO, we always did our archiving to DVDs as probably most people did and some still do. When we purchased Prinergy Connect due to the phasing out of EVO, I was told that you do not archive Prinergy jobs....you back them up with 1 or 2 (preferably 2) drives. One to stay at the shop and one you can take out of the office at night so you have a backup of the backup. It was not really explained to me what type of "drives" he was referring too. I assumed external hard drives. When I went to go shopping, I had multiple questions so I thought better to contact Kodak. The reply to me was that I could use an external hard drive but it would be an extremely unwise and unsafe solution and I should get a storage NAS or SAN. I could also look into another PC Computer with a large RAID Array. We're only a small company and I'm the only person that does prepress but we have a very important customer that we cannot afford to lose any files as they do multiple reorders. The great thing is the owner wants to do whatever is necessary to make sure we don't lose any files if possible. (Actually 95% of most files are dated so they're trash after they're printed anyway.) Drives are going to fail eventually, but the safer the better! So that's where I'm at.

 

[PricelineNegotiator]

Well honestly those drives were recommended to me by employees of IBM that do this for a living. 7,200 RPM drives are not that much more expensive, so you could expect the project to be under $1,500 for the situation you are in. I doubt you will see any sizeable difference in between 5,400, 7,200 or 10,000 rpm drives for his company. If he made the switch to m.2 NVMe drives over PCIe, then he would of course see a drastic improvement with a giant reduction in failure, but you are talking $5,000 instead of $1,500 and super overkill for speed.

 

[Joe]

So I now I look at my diskless question and think what an idiot I must sound like! Anyways....when we were using Prinergy EVO, we always did our archiving to DVDs as probably most people did and some still do. When we purchased Prinergy Connect due to the phasing out of EVO, I was told that you do not archive Prinergy jobs....you back them up with 1 or 2 (preferably 2) drives. One to stay at the shop and one you can take out of the office at night so you have a backup of the backup. It was not really explained to me what type of "drives" he was referring too. I assumed external hard drives. When I went to go shopping, I had multiple questions so I thought better to contact Kodak. The reply to me was that I could use an external hard drive but it would be an extremely unwise and unsafe solution and I should get a storage NAS or SAN. I could also look into another PC Computer with a large RAID Array. We're only a small company and I'm the only person that does prepress but we have a very important customer that we cannot afford to lose any files as they do multiple reorders. The great thing is the owner wants to do whatever is necessary to make sure we don't lose any files if possible. (Actually 95% of most files are dated so they're trash after they're printed anyway.) Drives are going to fail eventually, but the safer the better! So that's where I'm at.

I'm surprised Kodak didn't try to sell your their cloud archiving solution. They have been pushing it for awhile now. I'm guessing it would be a lot more expensive than a NAS unit though. We archive to our NAS unit. If you have really critical stuff you can't afford to lose I'd recommend the second offsite storage option also. A cloud service would work but you have to have quite good bandwidth to offload that much data. A second NAS would work but I wouldn't want to have to carry that home each night.

 

[scotts]

MattG, do you have RBA (Rules Based Automation). With being a "small" shop, I wouldn't think so, but I've been wrong before. Either way, like you said, you are the only one in Prepress, so speed of the backup is probably not really that big of an issue. 5400 RPMs over 7200, could make a difference in price for a small shop on a decision for backup. You could also setup a clone backup of your backups if you didn't want to take it offsite. Say main backup in room X in front of building, and then backup of backup in room Y in farthest corner away from room X in building. What is the chance of whole building being a loss? Just a thought.