FIrst I will give you the layout of my organization. We have 30 users spread over three different geographic locations, with one of those locations being a mobile engineering crew. The users all have personal laptops that they work from, we not have a domain controller. We even don't have an IT person, just me a chemical engineer who paid his way through university working desktop\network support making me the de facto IT person.
What I need is to build is network drive that will allow an administrator to assign read\write permissions to users who can access the network drive anywhere with a internet connection that does restrict such traffic. For the users they should see the drive as traditional network drive just like a mapped drive in a traditional LAN. I can do the configuration, but once that is done users should only need to sign on to windows locally and have access to the mapped drive. I have done some research and it sounds like ReadyNas remote will take care of the authentication of users to allow access to the storage.
So in short I want 30 remote users not on a domain to be able to access a mapped network drive that will allow administrators to assign read/write permissions to each user depending on their job function just like they would on a LAN network.
I am thinking the 314 model with 4x2 TB Enterprise HDDs in RAID5 array will meet our storage and reliability needs. I would like to buy two devices one for our US office and one for our India office. Some users may need to map network drives to both locations, at the user end for example the user would see drive E:\US and drive F:\India.
Also a quick RAID question, with 4 2-TB HDDs in RAID5 array, how much storage space will I have? I am thinking 2 TB storage space.
4x2 TB RAID5 will give about 6 TB (~5.4 TiB - power of two units).
Accessing the NAS over the internet is best done by deploying a VPN. This could be invisible to India and US locations [connecting router<->router], though the mobile folks would likely need to use a VPN client.
ReadyNAS remote is a VPN, but if you search the forums here, it's performance is hit-or-miss. Personally I wouldn't use it for anything that is mission-critical.
If a VPN seems too difficult, then perhaps enable FTP, and use an FTP client like FileZilla to access the remote files.
If I bridged our three locations together through VPN, would I be creating a LAN in essence? Would I be able to manage all three locations from one domain controller?
It would look like a single LAN though you would probably want three subnets, one for each location.
You could use a single domain - I am not sure on the plusses/minuses of using a single domain controller (I am not familiar with domain administration).
Using VPN tunnels is one way of building of a multi-site enterprise network.
