Well this is why research is done before product roll out…:) I purchased a server to use as my new storage host and it turns out the hard drive controller card is not suitable for the server product. Luckily I had another smaller server that will suffice for testing…except for the fact it has a bad chip on the motherboard that prevents the latest version of the storage software from running. Fortunately for me, the version i am running is still fully supported so no worries there. I actually have another server I can press into use(my previous virtualization host), I just need to get some ram for it..:)  While this a bit of a pain in the neck, it is a minor concern for testing purposes.

 I get the new software up and running….and it will not provision the drives. I get into the system and one of the drives has died and marked offline….bleh. External diags verified a dead drive. This means my 2 x 2 TB setup isn’t available. This development also means my new virtual host is also offline since I was borrowing those drives from it. Luckily I have two 1 TB laptop sata drives to play with. I installed those two into the storage server and got the machine the drives provisioned with full disk encryption and data compression enabled.  This is now looking really good.

I have a client who is willing to be my external test subject.  The next step is to get his NAS securely hooked into my new testbed. If this works(and there is no reason it won’t) then depending on the compression ratio I should be able to hold his 500 gigs of data in roughly half that space.  The next step is to see how to get windows machines to hit it as a backup target.

Now that I have configured the server the appliances are no problem as they would run the same setup.  Once I get that cracked it’s game on for a totally secure storage system from on-premises to my infrastructure to my infrastructure’s cloud backup….:) Here’s the kicker. The client’s storage appliance(or if the appliance is a backup target) is secure all the time..the connections to my infrastructure is encrypted..my server’s storage is encrypted and the connection to the cloud backup is encrypted.  

Once i can confirm this works as expected then it is on to getting this product chain HIPAA and other privacy regulations certified.