Posted: 11/18/2016 1:23:35 AM EDT
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Small business, 7-10 employees. Storing Engineering files (various 3D CAD), manuals, accounting, inventory system, and also acting as a license server for various PLC software. 2-3TB storage should suffice for a bit.
The current one I have is just a Windows box with a crap 7200RPM HDD - it is NOT ideal....and it's starting to be a real bottleneck. I am not an IT guy, but can fumble around when needed. So - help me spec hardware. Do I go after a Windows Server box, SSD's? I've got an Engineering workstation I am not using right now - it is and HP system with RAID control, 8 core HDD, prob 32gb ram or so... Could I put some drives in that and make it work for me? Should I bother with RAID? I currently back up to the cloud (Carbonite). I'd really like to clone the operating system on the current server if I could (Windows 10 I believe) because there are a few license server applications on it that are a real bitch to re-configure....then have a few other drives or a drive for storage... Thanks! |
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To clone your server and keep using it you would need to turn it into a virtual server. Cloud storage is fine but depending on the size of the data it will leave you screwed if you have to do a full backup from the cloud. As an IT guy, that deals with larger companies, I would recommend raid, an onsite backup, and your cloud backup. It is hard to spec a server without knowing what type of load it really has. A real server will have a 15,000 rpm SAS drive compared to what you are running now. SATA drives can either send traffic for reading or writting, SAS drives can do both at the same time. Or just go with higher end SSDs. There is no way to clone your server from hardware on to other hardware. It is technically possible but you will have so many problems that you might as well forget it. On your new server you can install Hyper-V and clone your old server as a virtual server. Then it will stay running on the new hardware. There will be some performance loss but it should still be faster than what it was. It would leave you with a new server which basically runs your old server.
If cost is an issue, which it always is, you can look at recondition equipment. My brother runs a company that buys off lease Dell servers, reconditions them, tests them, and then custom builds them for people in your situation. https://www.savemyserver.com/ |
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Nice thanks I'll check that out.
The HP box I have sitting here can run SAS drives. The load is relatively small - but I am not opposed to buying some 15krpm drives. I used to have them in my personal workstation - 4x of them in RAID10, but I switched it to SSD's.... Maybe SSD in RAID? |
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Quoted:
To clone your server and keep using it you would need to turn it into a virtual server. Cloud storage is fine but depending on the size of the data it will leave you screwed if you have to do a full backup from the cloud. As an IT guy, that deals with larger companies, I would recommend raid, an onsite backup, and your cloud backup. It is hard to spec a server without knowing what type of load it really has. A real server will have a 15,000 rpm SAS drive compared to what you are running now. SATA drives can either send traffic for reading or writting, SAS drives can do both at the same time. Or just go with higher end SSDs. There is no way to clone your server from hardware on to other hardware. It is technically possible but you will have so many problems that you might as well forget it. On your new server you can install Hyper-V and clone your old server as a virtual server. Then it will stay running on the new hardware. There will be some performance loss but it should still be faster than what it was. It would leave you with a new server which basically runs your old server. If cost is an issue, which it always is, you can look at recondition equipment. My brother runs a company that buys off lease Dell servers, reconditions them, tests them, and then custom builds them for people in your situation. https://www.savemyserver.com/ Mostly what he is saying. You are going to want sas drives in a server. 10k rpm drives are fine in many cases as they are good bit cheaper than the 15k drives which seem to be going away in favor of ssds. Even then you really would want enterprise grade drives that will work in a raid array. You also need to look at the advantages of windows server. While I'm not a big fan of it for a small environment windows server essentials is cheap and doesn't need user cals(licenses for the desktops to connect to it). Running cad license servers will take nothing in resources(acad, solid works, Bentley, carlson, etc). Other things to look into and consider. First make sure you are actually on gigabit. People will end up throwing cheap 100 megabit switches in places to hook up printers and stuff or will use voip phones with passthrough that don't support gigabit and it will slow everything down. Second don't rely on carbonite. Run a local backup as well. Even if it is just a cheap usb drive using windows backup or something like altaro's fs backup. |
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If you decided to go with SSDs in a raid make sure all the drives do not come from the same batch. They are rated for a certain number of reads/writes and the RAID spreads it out so the drives see almost identical use. Meaning when one drive fails the others can fail as well. There was an online game I was playing years ago that crashed and went down. The got a message up that it will be awhile before things came back online and the current game data would most likely be lost. The server was configured with SSD raid and they all failed at the same time. Everything was gone. They had to rebuilt the server, rebuild the raid, and restore the software from backups. That's why onsite backup, like I and ccosby suggested, is a good idea. Even a 5TB USB drive. It will give you something to instantly start rebuilding from with an ok transfer rate. |
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Quoted:
To clone your server and keep using it you would need to turn it into a virtual server. Cloud storage is fine but depending on the size of the data it will leave you screwed if you have to do a full backup from the cloud. As an IT guy, that deals with larger companies, I would recommend raid, an onsite backup, and your cloud backup. It is hard to spec a server without knowing what type of load it really has. A real server will have a 15,000 rpm SAS drive compared to what you are running now. SATA drives can either send traffic for reading or writting, SAS drives can do both at the same time. Or just go with higher end SSDs. There is no way to clone your server from hardware on to other hardware. It is technically possible but you will have so many problems that you might as well forget it. On your new server you can install Hyper-V and clone your old server as a virtual server. Then it will stay running on the new hardware. There will be some performance loss but it should still be faster than what it was. It would leave you with a new server which basically runs your old server. If cost is an issue, which it always is, you can look at recondition equipment. My brother runs a company that buys off lease Dell servers, reconditions them, tests them, and then custom builds them for people in your situation. https://www.savemyserver.com/ What a small world Arfcom is. Bought some R610's for lab use from there! |
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Quoted:
To clone your server and keep using it you would need to turn it into a virtual server. Cloud storage is fine but depending on the size of the data it will leave you screwed if you have to do a full backup from the cloud. As an IT guy, that deals with larger companies, I would recommend raid, an onsite backup, and your cloud backup. It is hard to spec a server without knowing what type of load it really has. A real server will have a 15,000 rpm SAS drive compared to what you are running now. SATA drives can either send traffic for reading or writting, SAS drives can do both at the same time. Or just go with higher end SSDs. There is no way to clone your server from hardware on to other hardware. It is technically possible but you will have so many problems that you might as well forget it. On your new server you can install Hyper-V and clone your old server as a virtual server. Then it will stay running on the new hardware. There will be some performance loss but it should still be faster than what it was. It would leave you with a new server which basically runs your old server. If cost is an issue, which it always is, you can look at recondition equipment. My brother runs a company that buys off lease Dell servers, reconditions them, tests them, and then custom builds them for people in your situation. https://www.savemyserver.com/ Thank you again for the tip. I found their eBay store and picked up a server from them that was exactly what I needed... 
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| If you have any problems with it let me know. The company bends over backwards to make things right when there are problems. My brother has been doing it long enough and dealt with enough scammers that they have a pretty solid routine for testing, documenting parts, and making sure it gets shipped out quickly. So that there they know they tested and shipped exactly what you ordered. |
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even for a relatively small 7-10 person company i would not take a traditional single "server"-based infrastructure approach. i would purchase an economical box to serve licenses, but i would not integrate the license function with bulk business file storage function. the loss of the latter threatens your company's welfare. these are two separate domains with separate issues and separate solutions. get a small business-class PC for doing the license serving. ASUS/Lenovo or equivalent. you don't need a lot of CPU or a fancy video card. you need reliability. get a pair of 4 bay NAS boxes from Synology (or similar) for file storage. they are inexpensive. get two pairs of 3 TB WD Red disks. they are also inexpensive. https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS416 https://www.amazon.com/Synology-DS416-Station-Diskless-Attached/dp/B016EWTC7E https://www.amazon.com/Red-3TB-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B008JJLW4M/ set up the two NAS boxes identically but in separate locations in your office building. alternatively, if you have the bandwidth, the second would optimally be off premise, for example at your home. the two NAS boxes can be set up using included Synology software to either stay in sync all the time, or periodically back one up to the other. i would recommend the latter. absolutely do not advertise to anyone the existence of the second NAS box -- this is VERY important from a business continuity perspective (e.g., if a disgruntled employee tries to sabotage all of your files). absolutely do not co-locate the NAS boxes, as a leaking overhead fire sprinkler head valve could wipe out your entire business. you should continue to maintain offsite incremental backups (e.g. to cloud) -- that is cheap insurance for a very rainy day. Synology software (among others) makes this easy. the above partitioned approach means your files and licenses are not tied to each other. if the license server hardware fails, it can be replaced easily and quickly using commodity hardware -- pretty much anything available from Staples (etc) will make a perfectly good license server, even a laptop will work in a pinch. meanwhile, the NAS's will go on serving up files so 7-10 people aren't sitting around doing nothing while "the server is down". 7-10 people on a average salary of say $45K/yr is at about $400K annual payroll, so downtime is expensive. if a NAS box fails, the second is sync'd and waiting. if a disk in the NAS box fails, the NAS will keep doing what it is doing until you get another drive from amazon for $100 including shipping. when it comes time to grow your file storage capacity, you just insert another 3TB disk into each 4 bay NAS box, wait for array integration, and bingo you have more capacity. this approach is not possible with traditional server hardware. moreover, from an IT security perspective the compartmentalization of your files on a NAS box means compromise of your server doesn't necessarily lead to immediate compromise of your file store. ar-jedi |
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Quoted:
If you have any problems with it let me know. The company bends over backwards to make things right when there are problems. My brother has been doing it long enough and dealt with enough scammers that they have a pretty solid routine for testing, documenting parts, and making sure it gets shipped out quickly. So that there they know they tested and shipped exactly what you ordered. Thanks. It arrived today and booted right up. Has Windows Server installed as well...it's 2008 but it wasn't advertised w/ the system so I'll take what I can get...that alone saves me $$ if I don't have to rebuy the licenses...especially since it's per CPU. |
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My 2 cents. Buy a desktop to host your license server and push everything else to a hybrid cloud solution. Invest your hardware cash where it's most neede--on your drafting workstations.
You'll get mobility with redundancy baked in and not worry about maintenance on your infrastructure. And unlimited storage is cheap so you can keep as many copies of the .dwg files as you want. Posting from my phone so I'm keeping it brief but will be happy to go in depth. |