If you know someone who's reliable in this field, the budget does include consultancy and I'd like to hear from him. The NAS thing sounds like a good option because the costs are finite(ish). I just hope speeds are decent.
If it takes a VPN or SSL to access, so be it, I'll have to teach the dinosaurs at our office to use it.
I'll ask my IT guy if this is within his ability, interest, and budget. If he responds - I'll get back to you.
He also has lots of geek friends - so if he can't/won't do it - I'll have him provide a referral. Is Chinese language only an issue?
Regardless - if I find a resource - I'll PM you for your contact info off-line.
One small issue - as you're an NGO - I'll need to see your website to ensure you're not doing "strange" things (like say greenpeace) that would place any staff in jeopardy or complicate their lives.
Please PM me with your NGO's website. If it's complicated, there's a couple of IT guys who advertise here on gokm that you can probably use.
Far as I know OP's NGO is as legit as it gets for a foreign NGO.
if you send me your download/uploud rate i can setup a raspberry pi cloud for under 100usd using your current server setup
As a guy working on big data in Kunming I can tell that bluppfisk is actually looking for an enterprise-grade, fast-speed, reliable storage solution and NAS is by no means a good options as accessing externally can 9 out of 10 be a nightmare.
Putting a server in HK or at China-telecom appears like a viable option in consideration of the desired speed as it mostly doesn't require VPN or SSH however you need a dedicated IT guy to take care of the hardware issues and regular maintenance which brings up an overhead that even exceeds the storage budget itself($10,000).
My idea for you is to grab a storage from Amazon China who is known for taking good care of hardware & backup issues then pay one time to have a IT guy to set up the access(upload & download) interface. Your tight budget can work in this protocol I feel.
@monexodus
The words ENTERPRISE-GRADE and USD 10k BUDGET are mutually contradictory. ENTERPRISE-GRADE software typically starts at USD 2k and goes up exponentially. Hardware costs and follow-on maintenance contracts will definitely engulf @bluppfisk's entire budget. In @bluppfisk's case - budget supersedes performance, brand, and cool features - which was my assumption for the critical core requirement - hence the SOHO NAS solution and the point towards the prolific online cloud solutions.
@bluppfisk
@monexodus made a valid suggestion about enterprise solutions - but the costs can be prohibitive if you're not careful.
ON-SITE SELF-HOSTED SYSTEM
I was thinking of a RAID 5+ system with a network card - but that means you'll have to sort of manage the thing - which I'm guessing nobody wants to do. RAID systems are High Availability (HA) and Fault Tolerant (FT), but are susceptible to catastrophic failure - aka when bad things happen - they happen big time. Example - long time ago - one of our client companies hosting my mail server (on the 2nd+ floor of a building...allegedly) went underwater during a particularly nasty typhoon. We lost all network services for about 2+weeks - I moved our domain hosting services to the USA after that.
SPEED
The hardware speed of ANY NAS solution is about 1,000x faster than ANY network speed you'll be able to muster in your specified environments - to include China - although China is RAPIDLY upgrading it's IT infrastructure as a result of the 4G mobile telecom migration. Speed is limited and therefore determined by your network speed.
I've asked my IT guy - but he's not trained or certified. I also gave him the option (suggestion) of reaching into his commercial IT resources to determine whether or not they can deliver a reliable, sustainable, scalable solution - but I'm doubtful.
To host in-house - you'll need to pick-up a minimum of THREE but more realistically, FIVE RAID spec'd hard drives (they should be identical for hardware RAID systems). A single 4 TB drive (4k GB) will run at least CNY 1k - so you're looking at CNY 5k minimum, just for the drives.
A RAID 5+ frame will cost a few hundred to a few thousand USD, depending on make, model, used or new, etc. Add in a RAID network card (with lots of hi-tech words, such as fiber-channel) etc - add roughly and USD 1-2k. The upfront CAPITAL COSTS aka CAPITAL EXPENDITURES or CAPEX of putting your own in-house RAID/NAS solution are NOT trivial AND you will definitely be disappointed by the remote connection speed, as it's operating over public lines - typically 1,000x slower than what the RAID systems can pump out.
Depending on the workload - RAID drives usually fail in the 3-5 year regime and should DEFINITELY be swapped out beginning year 3, for mission critical applications, such as hospital and patient records (as opposed to waiting for the drives to fail - which is also a somewhat acceptable strategy for RAID 5 systems). This implies someone in your office will need to manage the RAID/NAS system...it's not difficult - but it can be....depends on the level of IT experience and how well packaged your RAID/NAS solution is.
RECOMMENDED SOLUTION - REMOTELY HOSTED SOLUTION
This is the datacenter solution I suggested earlier - I notice you ALREADY have a website with your own intranet - so it should be a simple matter to boost the online storage of your website, to permit the storage and retrieval of LARGE files (such as video, photos, reports, etc) - hampered ONLY by your respective network connection speeds.
Most ISPs will try to rape you for add-on services, such as adding incremental storage. Example godaddycom charges USD 10/year (roughly) for 10gb of online cloudy storage - but you can get 10GB of storage online for free from googledrive, microsoft, etc - just by signiing up for their cloud service...
Your current website ISP host is probably the BEST solution for you - have them expand your physical storage with a cloud storage solution, assuming they don't try to rape you...
Then you won't have to manage anything - aside from an incremental increase in your ISP hosting fees.
COMPARISON OF CLOUD STORAGE SOLUTIONS
The following link is an undated comparison of cloud storage solutions - that you can use to compare whether it's more effective to opt for additional storage from your current provider or go with a third party to extend your enterprise's shared file storage solution(s).
Adding cloud storage is something you guys can do yourselves. There are a plethora of alternate solutions, such as dropbox, googleDrive, Microsoft's cloud drive (who's brand name I forget - one drive?), and Apple's iCloud solutions, to name a few of the more expensive, but feature laden solutions.
LINK
www.top10cloudstorage.com/compare-specs/
STATUS
I'll unilaterally assume this issue is closed unless you want me to follow up with an IN-HOUSE solution.
@laotou
Technically I don't favor remotely hosted solution anymore as it was exactly what we chose before switching to cost-effective dedicated server option(flexible & scalable, out-of-box, pay-as-you-go), whereby we stay away from issues like procuring the expensive hardware, constant maintenance and fatal hardware failure, although we have a capable on-site IT team.
For data uploading and retrieval, some open-source, hence free, FTP software package can simply suit the purpose at both server and client sides. All you need is to get a guy to configure the software, do the access control then put it on operation.
But I agree with you that access speed is fully determined by your network speed.
Access speed is not only network. How are people going to be working. What type of files how big are there files. How many people connected. Disk io can be a huge factor depending on how it is all being used I remember needing to add a tray off SSDs to a SAN solution in a office because of disk io. Every one including their expert nerd blamed the network speed. Got a demo tray added it to the SAN speed problems gone. You will need a local mirror of the files as well as a off site "cloud" based solution. If you have everything off site and vpn ssh tunnel ... What ever you use is down... What is an acceptable loss of business. If you have local only and you buy a solution for example a LaCie storage array and you lose a back plane .... What is acceptable loss of data and downtime. A enterprise solution can have 4 hour part replacement turn around. If in office storage make sure it redundant hardware. Synced between the two. How often you sync and again data can and will be loss at some point.
Not trying to be difficult but the solution should fit with in your business uses and needs .... Only two types of people in the world ... Those that have lost data and those that have not.
Other thing buying a storage solution is how you authenticate to your local machines. How are they backed up ? These all effect needs. Feel free to message with any questions.
I though Tencent was giving away 10TB of free cloud storage, but I think it was mobile related. Still might be worthwhile to see what Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba have on offer, as they compete hard against each other.
Free 100GB for 1year from Microsoft, but on US servers most likely.
For personal use be careful of 'free' cloud storage. The only offers I have seen have been free for a year, after that you need to pay, it is not cheap. It is almost as cheap to buy your own drive.
For small business use try to project costs over 5 years. Allowing for increases in data storage. Although you probably won't be storing video and other large files, and so your storage needs will be lower.
Once you have uploaded over a TB then the time it would take to download it all, and then upload to a new cloud, means that you will probably be stuck with that provider. And remember up/download speeds here in China.
There was also the case a year or so ago. One of the US cloud services was forced to shut down because people were storing pirated content on its servers. The site closed down without much warning and people lost everything. Even those customers who only stored legitimate files. The company's response was that people should have had a back up. Which kinda defeats one of the main business cases for cloud storage.
As a non-expert personal user with over 4Tb of data stored, and counting. If I was to use cloud storage I would use it only as a backup, and a platform to access my data from multiple devices. That way if I need to get off the cloud, I have all my data on a drive in the real world. If I need to dump the cloud, I only need to upload to a new cloud not download as well. And only a small portion of my data will need to be stored on the cloud, reducing costs when they kick in.
Finally, imagine if you had stored all your data on a 'Gcloud', and the problems you could be having if certain regimes decided they no longer liked the Gcloud. Imagine that the GFW Tsars may also wish to act against other institutions in the future.
