UbuntuSmallBusinessServer/usbs-storage

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Launchpad entry: ubuntu-small-business-server-blueprint
Packages affected:
Depends: https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/openafs-support, https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/server-maverick-cloud-gluster

Summary

This spec describes Ubuntu's Small Business Server storage, a solution aimed at making it easy for non-technical businesses set up an Ubuntu based server for a simple but scalable storage solution.

Packages and tools to make configuring of a Small Business Server for Ubuntu as easy as possible.

Some goals:

Easy configuring and distributing document store and other mountable filesystem resorces for local and remote users
Easy configuring and distributing generic diskresources for virtual machines
Scalability, adding new resources with no limits and as little computer outage as possible
Scalability, scale when the company start up other locations
Security; encrypted, distributed, redundancy and backup-strategy

The process for investigation:

Indentify best-of-bread solutions on the Ubuntu-platform for Ubuntu-servers and clients
When this is done, check how to involve other client operatingsystems, check if there is any feature in Microsoft Small Business Server not adressed
Make a full scale test

Rationale

The free software universe in general, and Ubuntu in particular, already provides most of the tools and infrastructure components needed to fulfill the needs of small businesses. What we need is good integration between these components and easy configuration.

Use Cases

Jane is responsible primary for accounting, and secondary, IT at a small business and needs storage for Open ERP and indirect PostgreSQL.
John wants to be able to work at his home-desktop and on the train on his laptop (offline) and share the same documents that he has at his office workstation.
Steven finds out that he has done some major deletes by accident some days ago in one of the documents hes working with. He wants to be able to recover to an earlier version of his document using the file manager (Nautilus).
Rose wants to share documents with a) her colleagues in management b) all of her colleagues at office. This without compromise the integrity of information between these groups.
Matt discover that one storage server have severe hardvare malfunctions. The service agreement states that he has to send the computer to the service workshop. When he do so hes not compromising the business or industrial secrets, nor he creates computer outage.
Cathrine wants to add storage resources to the company network, she founds a storage server that can handle more disks so she buys some more large disks and adds them.
Tony is starting a branch office and connects his small network to cooperate with company network.

Scope

Storage and file servers. Announcing services, adding users and workstations. Administrating rights and adding resources. Implementing backup, redundancy and distribution.