IT / Data Center Sanity Check

[Numtini]

I just need a sanity check. I'm a one person shop and very small potatoes. Basically our infrastructure is 30 desktops and an Exchange Server and File server in one building. And two other buildings with a single server and 10 and 15 PCs respectively. We run a couple of databases with 3-6 users, mostly VB front ends to Access or the free version of SQL Server. We use the lowest level of comcast business and as it is our firewall only passes a fraction of that potential speed anyway. Our internet traffic is 3-4gig a day, including an online backup. And as far as I can tell in my blissful ignorance, we're doing just fine.

But now stimulus money has the fiber coming to town. And they're trying to push the use of a regional data center. Am I crazy in thinking this kind of complication and presumably cost is kind of overkill when my entire server infrastructure is currently running on Hyper-V on a spare i7 desktop?

I don't have the highest respect for my local peers, but after saying "I'm not really sure why we need a gigabyte fiber connection and a data center for 50 end users" and having people look at me like I'm crazy, I'm starting to doubt myself.

[Ingmar]

With that few users, I think I would be trying to go entirely hosted/cloud with my email. Running a local Exchange server for 50 people is overkill, going to Office 365 or Google Apps would save a lot of your time in the long run. I don't think you'd be able to have your other databases live there, though.

How are you covered for disaster recovery type issues right now? Do you have offsite backup, UPS power with generator backup, etc.? Those are going to be the real factors that decide if the datacenter is a big plus for you IMO, the bandwidth is unimportant unless you're regularly capping anyway.

[Ironwood]

You're not crazy.

There are things I'd do for your organisation that might help it, but pushing a fibre datacenter on you seems a little much.

(Hint :  You need an Exchange Server like you need a hole in the head. I suspect you have one because you've Always Had One.)

[Numtini]

Actually next year's project is to move our email to Google.

We offsite backup with Mozy Pro which I've been very satisfied with and a few sets of redundant backups locally. (Script that copies the VM files nightly, plus a weekly disk clone of the host server). Since we do have multiple sites to play with, I'm looking at setting up cross-building backups using Crashplan or an appliance as another layer.

[Minvaren]

I can't really see the benefits of putting your single server for your (basically) single site on "the cloud" myself, given what you've described thus far.

[Ironwood]

Nor do I.  Just wouldn't be cost effective.

Glad you're moving the e-mail though.  I'll be surprised if the idea of people hosting their own mail lasts any longer than the next 3 years.

[Ingmar]

Nor do I.  Just wouldn't be cost effective.

Glad you're moving the e-mail though.  I'll be surprised if the idea of people hosting their own mail lasts any longer than the next 3 years.

The cost/benefit I just did for our organization showed it to be cheaper for us to keep running our own server over the next 5 years than to go to a hosted alternative. We're right in that 300-500ish zone where the hardware cost is basically negligible but we don't get any economy of scale on the hosted cost vs. CALs, though. If we were much smaller (or much larger) going to hosted mail would have made sense.

[Trippy]

It depends on how critical it is for your systems to be running 24/7. In their current locations how long can they run if the power goes out? What happens if the Internet connection is down? Do you have failover systems? Who manages those? Moving stuff to a data center may provide better uptimes and if they also provide management services that can offload work from you. If those things are important to your business then it's something to consider.

[Chimpy]

If you have less than 50 employees, using Google for hosted email is pretty much unbeatable.

[ajax34i]

Yup, it is.  However, you have to train the users to periodically check their google mail spam folder for stuff that's mistaken as spam.

3 buildings here, about 60 users total.  Desktop applications, no servers, google mail, VPN tunnels between the three buildings (router-to-router) for cross-printing and file sharing.  Bizhub copiers / scanners / heavy duty printing, and otherwise the biggest cost is the damn ink for all the inkjets, cause everyone wants to have their own printer, le sigh.

[Ingmar]

Yup, it is.  However, you have to train the users to periodically check their google mail spam folder for stuff that's mistaken as spam.

3 buildings here, about 60 users total.  Desktop applications, no servers, google mail, VPN tunnels between the three buildings (router-to-router) for cross-printing and file sharing.  Bizhub copiers / scanners / heavy duty printing, and otherwise the biggest cost is the damn ink for all the inkjets, cause everyone wants to have their own printer, le sigh.

But I print out incredibly important and EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL material that I can't run the risk of someone else seeing during my 2 minute walk to the printer!!!

[ajax34i]

OMG yes.   I'm just about the only one that prints to the Bizhub, and it's on the other side of the building.  And, when I get there to pick up my stuff, they go "Oh it's you printing.  This thing is annoying, it just powers up on its own and starts doing something with no one operating it.  Can't you print somewhere else?"

[Numtini]

I have people down to one printer per office, but it's amazing the lengths people will go to in whinging about it. My printer nightmare will be starting in another 30 to 45 days. We have no central air and at the beginning of every summer, I get "printer is broken messages" because the paper curls and envelopes seal themselves.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. These are all things I was aware of and thought out, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't insane, I understood the issues, and everyone with 50-100 desktops wasn't doing this in the real world. There's a lot of hype and it's frankly like "The Music Man" here with everyone jumping on the bandwagon of stuff that just makes no sense whatsoever to me.

[Engels]

Hype can lead people to do stupid stuff in IT. Recently a friend who does IT for a group of 5 people got brow-beaten into setting up the group's website, about 20 pages tops, using .... Wait for it... Drupal.

[Bann]

PRINTER RAGE. I work in a school, and one of the hats I wear is IT guy. Before I arrived, the teachers had somehow finagled their way into a printer in every classroom. This must have been done over a 4 or 5 year period, as there are no more than 2 matching models in the whole building. I spend the majority of planning time bouncing between classrooms clearing paperjams or shaking printer cartridges. So annoying. I made moving to centralized printing the focal point of my tech plan for next year.

We use google mail for our school (right around 40 users), and I couldn't be happier with it. I Highly recommend it.

[Merusk]

Don't you work in a Gvt office, Num, or was that just Lant?  If so, I can totally see them looking at you like you've got two heads because money given and not spent is money that's lost the next year.  So, by their logic, blowing a wad on infrastructure, no matter how over the top, is a good idea because you'll never get that windfall again and likely get even less next year because "hey, they didn't need the money we offered them last year, they must be able to cut some stuff."

Also, there's always the bragging rights.  Never underestimate the power of being able to say "I have ultraleetsetupxyz"  has  over some people.

[Sky]

Hype can lead people to do stupid stuff in IT. Recently a friend who does IT for a group of 5 people got brow-beaten into setting up the group's website, about 20 pages tops, using .... Wait for it... Drupal.

I'm getting pressure to do this, or the other guy wants to use Google Sites. I just got a compliment from a major benefactor on our simple html site that has everything laid out logically with easy access and info-rich pages. Derp. I'm so tired of hearing 'website redesign'. A couple years ago I changed the font color and backgrounds, new logos and people got all excited 

The thing that really gets me is when I try to dig for "WHY" Content management...why? So people can update their own areas. "Like what?" Well, once they can they will. Huh? If the libs want to run blogs, we can link to their blogs. Basically, every time I dig deeper into 'why?' it ends up with some links to external content. Someone gets all worked up reading a "library 2.0" site or listening to some buzzword-enamored colleague or just went to some dippy seminar.

Also moving to gmail at some point in the near future.

[CmdrSlack]

Hype can lead people to do stupid stuff in IT. Recently a friend who does IT for a group of 5 people got brow-beaten into setting up the group's website, about 20 pages tops, using .... Wait for it... Drupal.

I'm getting pressure to do this, or the other guy wants to use Google Sites. I just got a compliment from a major benefactor on our simple html site that has everything laid out logically with easy access and info-rich pages. Derp. I'm so tired of hearing 'website redesign'. A couple years ago I changed the font color and backgrounds, new logos and people got all excited 

The thing that really gets me is when I try to dig for "WHY" Content management...why? So people can update their own areas. "Like what?" Well, once they can they will. Huh? If the libs want to run blogs, we can link to their blogs. Basically, every time I dig deeper into 'why?' it ends up with some links to external content. Someone gets all worked up reading a "library 2.0" site or listening to some buzzword-enamored colleague or just went to some dippy seminar.

Also moving to gmail at some point in the near future.

We were almost there . . . I had sold the boss on keeping Google for email and firm-wide calendaring. We were about to move to a cloud-based timekeeping system like Clio. Then came the friend of the family peddling the Emperor's new clothes. Now we have some half-assed exchange server and an overly complex, brand-name practice management software package.

We have, at most, 14 employees. But we should totally be hosting our own email server.

[Sky]

We've been moving to gmail as part of an older plan to set up our domain there, we've got about 21 FTEs. The library system is buying into our idea all-in, they're tired of dealing with email server bullshit. I can't believe they're hosting their own datacenter, actually. Ask 'em about zinc whiskers.

[Hammond]

Nor do I.  Just wouldn't be cost effective.

Glad you're moving the e-mail though.  I'll be surprised if the idea of people hosting their own mail lasts any longer than the next 3 years.

I think you are right for most part organizations are going to move to gmail or something equivelent however there will always be some companies that will still do it themselves.  For the company I work for I highly doubt we will ever host anything more externally other than our website.  They just feel more secure having everything in house.  We are all decked out for disaster recovery with multisite backups, generator, fire suppresion in the datacenter etc etc.
 
On a side note we are getting fiber to our building from one of those stimulus grants which should be installed in the next week or so.  The ISP that is lighting the fiber was trying to get us to buy a gig port and we just laughed.  We are going to probably end up with a nice 20 meg / 20 meg connection which is more than ample for our vpn, email, some webhosting needs. 

[Numtini]

I use Wordpress for small sites. It's easy setup and maybe some people can be trusted to update it themselves. I found Drupal extremely convoluted, personally, and I'm a little mystified as to how it's become so popular.

And yes, this is government. It's a stimulus project and they're making all sorts of promises and coming across with a sell that's basically "nobody can live without this stuff, you've all been begging for these services for years."

Personally I can't possibly see the point in running a fiber middle mile to a 250k retirement community with virtually no IT business that is already 99% served by comcast and 50% dual served by DSL. Nor can I imagine why we qualified given the widespread broadband penetration. But nobody asked me. At 45 years old, I'm too young for my opinions to be taken seriously anyway by local standards. Something which probably has more to do with why tech companies don't relocate here than anything having to do with broadband penetration.

[Sky]

Verizon put a fiber drop in here a year or so ago. I got called out to the desk and they were all "Hey what's up, where do you want it?" First anyone had heard of it, they were rolling it down the road and just decided to install some here. We dropped the t1 and went with some really basic plan (10Mb).

I couldn't convince them to run it to my house five blocks off the state route :)

[Khaldun]

We use WordPress for faculty and staff blogs, though to my eternal aggravation IT is so scared of faculty users having any administrative access they won't let us update our own WordPress installations. But Drupal, man, I have no idea why some people think it's easy to work with, I think it's a mess.

[Hammond]

I use Wordpress for small sites. It's easy setup and maybe some people can be trusted to update it themselves. I found Drupal extremely convoluted, personally, and I'm a little mystified as to how it's become so popular.

And yes, this is government. It's a stimulus project and they're making all sorts of promises and coming across with a sell that's basically "nobody can live without this stuff, you've all been begging for these services for years."

Personally I can't possibly see the point in running a fiber middle mile to a 250k retirement community with virtually no IT business that is already 99% served by comcast and 50% dual served by DSL. Nor can I imagine why we qualified given the widespread broadband penetration. But nobody asked me. At 45 years old, I'm too young for my opinions to be taken seriously anyway by local standards. Something which probably has more to do with why tech companies don't relocate here than anything having to do with broadband penetration.

Yea for most of these stimulus projects I have seen its more about who got in first to get the money more than anything that made actual sense.  They are on there 3rd round of projects here locally and one stretch of fiber around 10 miles long literally runs a web camera and 1 pc. Its sad and a waste of money but nobody that has done the planning actually understands how to build infrastructure of this type. 

 I hope in your case they actually have someone that is going to maintain the fiber and have budgeted that into the build I have seen that mistake far to often.  My suggestion though just take the fiber connection and smile and nod and just use it for Internet (assuming its actually lite up).  Most likely this is political decision more than anything and its not good to get between a politician and and something that makes them look good.

[Morfiend]

Since we seem to be on the topic of CMS, I am interested to get all of your opinions on Wordpress. Well, not your opinions on it, but wether you would consider Worpress a CMS. I was arguing with a friend of mine about it. He is a pretty hardcore PHP programmer and he feels that it isnt a CMS while I said that it was.

[Numtini]

Seems like a CMS to me. It allows easy entry of information by end users without knowing html etc. It's certainly limited, depending on what templates you're using, but it's still a CMS.

[Engels]

Well it's a content management system. You know what it's a buzzword. My wallet is also a cms.

[Lantyssa]

It's CMS, but limited as Numtini says.

Most CMS is, in some fashion, by its very nature.  The idea is to manage content in a consistent way.  The content is could be a blog, web pages, media, or a combination.  That's what is determined by how extensive the CMS is.

[Salamok]

Wordpress works very well as a CMS and is great for quickly setting up those 5 page brochure sites (and more).  The down side is there seems to be a certain critical mass you can hit with wordpress where you have just pushed the envelope too far and the site will just start crawling.  Currently looking into various CMS's for our site and the product list of CMS's you can trust with a high traffic site and 1000's of pages of content isn't as promising as my preconceptions led me to believe it was.

[Lantyssa]

I can't say what's out there since I rather hate the few CMSes I've been exposed to, but if you have thousands of pages and lots of traffic, you probably need a custom solution.

[Sky]

If you can't figure out Dreamweaver and you use Word on a daily basis, shame on you. Imo.

Even html, which is the bulk of the 'content' regions on our website, is simple.

[Salamok]

Trying to shame 4000 government employees into meeting Sky's minimum requirements isn't quite within my realm of shit I can control. 

Drupal (and a few other CMS's) can and do handle my current scenario frequently, not really going down this road thinking I am going to enjoy the journey.  I'm thinking of it as more of an exercise in standardization which will hopefully result in some sort of self sustaining site where my only involvement involves keeping an eye on the health of the system and focusing on the 10% of our web projects that do not involve content (apps).

Unfortunately this type of due diligence is depressing for me as it really hammers home the point that all code is shit.

[Hammond]

I have worked with a few cms's most of them were not a great experience.   Drupal, joomla, wordpress and even sharepoint all have left a bad taste in my mouth.  Every single one has had issues of some kind and some of the security issues have been  huge.  I have seen more hacked wordpress sites than any cms period. Mostly due to the buggy crappy coding that is out there.

[fuser]

But now stimulus money has the fiber coming to town. And they're trying to push the use of a regional data center. Am I crazy in thinking this kind of complication and presumably cost is kind of overkill when my entire server infrastructure is currently running on Hyper-V on a spare i7 desktop?

As Trippy mentioned you really should consider the factors of power/hvac/physical security/redundant connections. We're a small outfit around the same size running on a single SBS2K8 server.  I'm in the middle of staged migration to Google Apps and ripping up most of our file storage(god I wish branchcache had a client that worked like dropbox). All of our business "apps" are web based and currently hosted on our dedicated hardware in a datacenter because of our very unreliable power grid and lack of generator backup. The second consideration for moving our apps off-site was the growth in mobile or remote users. The cost efficient solution was to switch to using cheap bandwidth in the datacenter vs upgrading our local connection to a higher speed dedicated connection.

[Ironwood]

Where are you putting your File Storage ?  How much are we talking ?