DIY NAS and The Effect of Open Source on Small Business

As I noted earlier, I dropped my attempts to use a SoHo NAS product in favor of building a NAS from spare parts and a couple of extra items (an SFF case, SATA card and extra drives). The total cost of the DIY NAS was about $700, and it did involve some time for configuration. Cost-wise, if you are billing your time, it probably comes out to a wash to go DIY or buy the Netgear ReadyNAS NV. The ReadyNAS NV is a step above the products I tested in cost, features, and functionality.

However, I have found other uses for the new NAS that make the configuration effort worthwhile, at least for me. We have been running an installation of SugarCRM, but a little while ago we had to re-purpose the machine it was running on, and we had not taken the time to re-install SugarCRM anywhere else. Enter the DIY NAS, a full-featured Ubuntu 7.1 server. In a couple of hours, we were able to install and configure a base deployment of SugarCRM Community Edition. (If you have worked with a CRM system, you know that installation and configuration is just the beginning of the effort for building and maintaining an effective  system). I expect theSugarCRM system to be low traffic in the short term, so pulling double-duty as a file server and CRM application should be fine. Long term, we will need to port the CRM system to more powerful hardware, but for now we have added significant capability to our business at minimal cost. We may also set up the NAS as our local LDAP server in the office, though as a small business we are not yet at the point where domain services are a real necessity. 

For small business, the combination of ever-faster computer hardware and open source software provides a low-cost avenue to business automation that was once the province of huge corporations. Today, any mom-and-pop shop with some technical skills or a few thousand dollars for consulting services can deploy enterprise-class business automation solutions. In one sense, it signals a loss of competitive advantage for big enterprise, and it knocks down an argument for scale in business, which is the cost and complexity of such solutions. There are still lots of other reasons why scale matters, but it is interesting to see how IT evolution has become an equalizer for small businesses.