Best IT-infrastructure For a Small Company? 600
DiniZuli writes "I've been employed by a small NGO to remake their entire IT-infrastructure from scratch. It's a small company with 20 employees.
I would like to ask the /.-crowd what worked out best for you and why? I came up with a small list:
Are there any must have books on building the IT infrastructure?
New desktops: should it be laptops (with dockingstations), regular desktop machines or thin clients? A special brand?
Servers: We need a server for authentication and user management. We also need an internal media server (we have thousands of big image and video files, and the archive grows bigger every year). Finally we would like to have our web server in house. Which hardware is good? Which setup, software and OS'es have worked the best for you?
Since we are remaking everything, this list is not exhaustive, so feel free to comment on anything important not on the list."
Re:Do my job please. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't buy any servers. Use the cloud. (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe that's indeed what he should do since he already doesn't know enough to do it himself, have other people do everything.
It sure is getting CLOUDY (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ask Slashdot (Score:3, Funny)
"NO!!!! MR. PRESIDENT!!!!! thats the one that launches all the missiles.
Well which one gets me a latte?
The other big red button!
Ohh, who designed this?"
Re:Do my job please. (Score:1, Funny)
Easy. /.crowd advices and then do exactly the opposite. /.crowd discussed stocks too. I would retire by now.
DiniZulu, carefully listen to
I wish
Re:Why do you want to keep webserver inhouse? (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah. Build everything on your own. For those 20 people, it is totally cost efficient to ditch all those buzzword-toting salespeople and roll your own. Your own certified infrastructure, your own incident team, your own UPSs, your own false floors, your own operating systems, compiled with all optimizer switches on, of course, and your own client PC images, complete with in-house developed software distribution and policies.
After about 300 man-years worth of training, you're able to surpass most commercial offers. 300 man-years more and you're doing stuff in-house even Google dreams about. Then it's definitely cost-effective.
You can totally trust The Cloud. (Score:1, Funny)
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.