As the first post in this blog, I thought I'd explain what I'm doing with it and what I intend for this to grow into.
First, about our company:
We're a pretty small company (in the range of 10 employees, though a few positions come and go from time to time), but we have locations in two different cities. It's an architecture firm, so we need lots of storage space, and our work can be pretty graphics-intensive.
Five years ago, we finally got our first real servers, replacing a haphazard system of locally-stored files and networked computers in a workgroup. I'd worked with DFS during college (since I enjoy this stuff as a hobby, I assisted the network administrator for the College of Architecture for a few semesters), so I knew that was the best way to provide everyone with a single place for all our files, and to ensure that everyone in both offices had the same data.
Alas, we purchased our servers about 6 months before Server 2003 R2 was released, and the original version of Server 2003 was missing some features I would come to mourn not having. Highest among these was the ability to "seed" a replication group...when it came time to reformat the servers and start over (remember, 2003 was based on XP-era technology), I had to actually erase all our files and re-sync them afresh from the other server once it was back up. Usually, that's but an annoyance, but in this case the files were synched over a relatively slow WAN connection, and it would take months to fully propogate, during which time the office with the reinstalled server would be working off the remote server...very slowly. The only time I actually did this, I ended up physically taking the first server to the second office for a weekend to let it sync locally, then brought it back up and plugged it back in at it's own office once that was done. Yikes.
There are a number of issues that have come up besides that ever-present cloud over me, but finally we've reached the point where the servers have stopped syncing our data with each other at all, so it's time to replace them.
I've evaluated a number of options - SANs (Drobo), cloud computing (Live, Azure), thin clients and alternate Server editions (SBS), etc to try and keep costs down as much as possible in this pretty tight time, but I kept coming back to on-site full-meal-deal Windows Server boxes. The glimmer of hope I had was that the far less expensive Foundation edition might meet my needs: Active Directory and DFS. Not much good documentation exists for Foundation, but I've spent several weeks working with a very helpful team over at Dell and finally came to the conclusion that it will, in fact, meet my needs - my total bill thus coming to about 1/3 what it otherwise would have.
There aren't many businesses that fit in the crosshairs of the Foundation demographic (fewer than 15 users, but with needs of a real Server operating system), which is doubtlessly why there's so little good information on it specifically, so I'm hoping that by documenting my "travels" through this obscure system, there might be someone else who is helped by my experience, in addition to being a good start to my documentation of our new network infrastructure.
Tomorrow my new servers arrive, and thus begins the adventure. Hopefully I'll emerge victorious on the other side.
First, about our company:
We're a pretty small company (in the range of 10 employees, though a few positions come and go from time to time), but we have locations in two different cities. It's an architecture firm, so we need lots of storage space, and our work can be pretty graphics-intensive.
Five years ago, we finally got our first real servers, replacing a haphazard system of locally-stored files and networked computers in a workgroup. I'd worked with DFS during college (since I enjoy this stuff as a hobby, I assisted the network administrator for the College of Architecture for a few semesters), so I knew that was the best way to provide everyone with a single place for all our files, and to ensure that everyone in both offices had the same data.
Alas, we purchased our servers about 6 months before Server 2003 R2 was released, and the original version of Server 2003 was missing some features I would come to mourn not having. Highest among these was the ability to "seed" a replication group...when it came time to reformat the servers and start over (remember, 2003 was based on XP-era technology), I had to actually erase all our files and re-sync them afresh from the other server once it was back up. Usually, that's but an annoyance, but in this case the files were synched over a relatively slow WAN connection, and it would take months to fully propogate, during which time the office with the reinstalled server would be working off the remote server...very slowly. The only time I actually did this, I ended up physically taking the first server to the second office for a weekend to let it sync locally, then brought it back up and plugged it back in at it's own office once that was done. Yikes.
There are a number of issues that have come up besides that ever-present cloud over me, but finally we've reached the point where the servers have stopped syncing our data with each other at all, so it's time to replace them.
I've evaluated a number of options - SANs (Drobo), cloud computing (Live, Azure), thin clients and alternate Server editions (SBS), etc to try and keep costs down as much as possible in this pretty tight time, but I kept coming back to on-site full-meal-deal Windows Server boxes. The glimmer of hope I had was that the far less expensive Foundation edition might meet my needs: Active Directory and DFS. Not much good documentation exists for Foundation, but I've spent several weeks working with a very helpful team over at Dell and finally came to the conclusion that it will, in fact, meet my needs - my total bill thus coming to about 1/3 what it otherwise would have.
There aren't many businesses that fit in the crosshairs of the Foundation demographic (fewer than 15 users, but with needs of a real Server operating system), which is doubtlessly why there's so little good information on it specifically, so I'm hoping that by documenting my "travels" through this obscure system, there might be someone else who is helped by my experience, in addition to being a good start to my documentation of our new network infrastructure.
Tomorrow my new servers arrive, and thus begins the adventure. Hopefully I'll emerge victorious on the other side.
No comments:
Post a Comment