: This data is obviously very import to your business. So managing the risk of data loss is very important as well. Take the following into consideration: Amazon S3 is designed to provide

This data is obviously very import to your business. So managing the risk of data loss is very important as well. Take the following into consideration:

Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability. Basically, your data will be very well protected against hardware failure as well as against things such as power & network problems. Their data centers are probably much more resilient and protected against things like fire, hurricanes, theft, etc...

Implementing and maintaining your own NAS will cost you in terms of acquiring the hardware, putting it together, learning how it works, testing it, rolling it to production, monitoring it, etc... A highly-available NAS (meaning a mirror of 2 or more NAS heads each with their own set of drives) will cost you even more. And you still won't be on par with S3 - especially if you are hosting it in an office and not in a real data center. If you are hosting your servers from your own office, how well are they protected against fire, theft, power outages? Also, do you have redundant networking to protect against network hardware failures? What if your SA is on vacation and something happens to your NAS system? When your SA leaves your company, you will have to find an SA who knows how to manage your custom system. If that weren't enough, do you have a disaster recovery plan that includes having off-site copies of your data in case your server room burned to the ground?

Hosting your own NAS could be as cheap as using a lower-end solution from drobo.com or synology.com. A more scalable, mid-range solution is to build your own NAS with products from coraid.com and nexenta.com or going with a custom-built system from any of the companies listed at nexenta.com partners/resellers. These solutions will also take more time to implement than going with S3.

No matter which solution you choose, be sure you are doing regular backups of your data. Sure, a fault-tolerant storage solution will protect against hardware failure, but it won't protect against user error and malicious activities.

I hope this is helpful to you!

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