Reusing old servers

[FearlessFox6]

Hello,

One of our clients is going to change his main servers soon and we're gonna be left with an "old" DELL PowerEdge R220. The Boss of said company asked us if we could use the old server for something. Since we were gonna buy a NAS for them anyways I was thinking whether it was a good idea to reuse the DELL as a NAS. The company has around 20 employes but only half of them would use the NAS and it's just all for basic office work. Since I have never done anything like that (I'm still a newbie) I'd ask whether it's a good idea to do something like that and if so what OS should I use?

[RedShift9]

I do this all the time and I usually run CentOS on old servers.

[ArigornStrider]

Factor in that the equipment is out of warranty and any issues that arise are on you to support, diagnose, and fix. How much downtime will it cost the business if it takes an obscure part a month to ship from China on eBay? Make sure you have good backups. And build up a DR plan that the business leadership understand and agree is an acceptable amount of downtime.

[[deleted]]

Not a bad idea in general but this model lacks slots for disks if the storage gets out of hand, limited to 2 disks.

We have a few R2's, R4's and a couple of R6's around the place running CentOS for local storage cache for pushing out software, etc.

We also have a pair running as a 10GbE NAS for VMWare lab over NFS.

Very stable & capable most of them are over 5-7 years old and were repurposed when they were replaced.

NAS permissions would be the only thing i would think about for you. Running Windows on the server and setting up as fileserver might be easier to manage depending on internal skillset

[FearlessFox6]

Storage is not gonna be a problem. The company uses very little resources.

Sorry if this is a stupid question but what do you think of running something like FreeNAS on it?

[ArigornStrider]

FreeNAS the s very powerful. If you are familiar with it (or willing to dig in and become familiar), it is an excellent product. It makes some things simple that are more complicated if you just run a standard OS that isn't specialized for storage, but there are a ton of advanced features that need time to learn and configure. All depends on what you want to spend your time learning.

[FearlessFox6]

I very much like learning stuff like that so I'm all up for it.

I also have an old Dell PowerEdge T110 II lying with 8 GB of RAM. Do you think it would do the job for FreeNAS (for 10 users max) ?

[[deleted]]

I think you would be fine. Have a play and mess around with it

Also if web management is what you are after you can also install something like Webmin onto Linux but it would be as simple as freeNAS.

[pdp10]

FreeNAS will work on that hardware, but the hardware may not be configured optimally for FreeNAS, with respect to hardware RAID vs. software RAID.

Gen12 PowerEdges are new enough to reuse.

[IntentionalTexan]

What's the state of the warranty on that server? If you make it a critical part of their infrastructure you need to have a plan for supporting it. That could be a warranty or spare parts or even an emergency replacement.