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."
Ask Slashdot (Score:1, Informative)
Did anyone else read this thread as.. (Score:2, Informative)
Do my job for me?
"I've been hired by a small NGO. They have about 20 employees. I do not yet know enough about what I have been hired to do, so I am turning to Slashdot. Please, do my job for me and help me look good."
Re:Don't buy any servers. Use the cloud. (Score:4, Informative)
Then you can concentrate full time on keeping your internet connection working because you'll be screwed without it
Re:Did anyone else read this thread as.. (Score:1, Informative)
YES. Sounds like this guy B.S.ed his interview and the wrong idiot got hired. If he had any experience at all in this field (IT is for failed engineers anyways) then he wouldn't have to have slash dot do his job for him.
Keep it simple (Score:5, Informative)
We need details! (Score:1, Informative)
Don't go cheap with hardware (Score:5, Informative)
For servers: Use Supermicro-based servers with LSI hardware RAID cards. Run CentOS with SMB so that you can get domain support in place for the Windows workstations, but avoid having to pay obnoxious per-seat/per-connection licensing ON TOP OF server licensing as you would have to do with Microsoft's solutions. If you need a full feature alternative to Exchange, check out Scalix or Zimbra (both are very inexpensive compared to Exchange) and run either one on CentOS. For backups, I've become partial to just writing bash scripts to back up to external drives. Get three or more external hard drives and rotate through them day by day. If Windows is required for your server, I would recommend the same hardware, but be aware that the total costs are much, much higher when you factor in Server+client access licensing + groupware solution + realtime antivirus (annual subscription) + email gateway antivirus (annual subscription unless you want to wrestle with perl to get ASSP running on 64-bit Windows) = your new server is incredibly expensive. Another problem with Windows licensing is eventually Microsoft will pull the plug on client access licenses for your installed version, which means that you will be forced into an OS upgrade if the current OS would otherwise be perfectly adequate for your purposes.
For workstations: to decrease total cost of ownership (the pain of maintenance. If you are not married to Windows, consider using Macintoshes instead. Mac Minis offer pretty decent performance and take up a lot desk estate than PCs of comparable quality, plus you can also run Windows and Linux on Mac hardware if you need to. Why OS X? You can escape the insanity of malware/virus/trojan horse breakouts, maintenance is a heck of a lot easier, and backup and restore is far easier on a Mac than it is on Windows.
For laptops if maximum reliability and desktop-like performance are the priority: I would recommend Macbook Pro, or if you want real mobile workstations and if the budget allows it, Dell Precision M6500. I have a Dell Precision M6400 and it's great- they cram a desktop chipset into the laptop form factor and performance is excellent, plus if I enable all the power saving features I can still manage to get 3-4 hours of use on a charge (about an hour if I turn off power management for max performance). The M6500 is far better than my M6400 performance-wise as it uses Core i5/i7 processors and a newer generation nVidia chipset. If portability is a concern I would still go with the Dell Precision line, but the M4500. If budget is a concern and rules out the precisions, some of the Latitudes are pretty good as well, but I would stay far away from any of Dell's other laptop lines as the other lines are not built nearly as well (their netbooks are okay though).
Info for NGO (Score:1, Informative)
Check you techsoup.org. Cheap and free software for 501.c3 organizations.
Hire me? (Score:5, Informative)
OK, seriously, I've done a couple dozen of these 10 to 50 user installations. Half the time is spent at the beginning to determine what the customer needs and wants, and what the budgeting will be. Things invariably cost a lot more than the customer anticipated so your goal is to manage expectations. If you don't do that, your life will either become a living hell (if you will be providing long-term support) or you will leave behind an unhappy customer.
Some of the basic things that were not considered when customers brought me on:
Are there remote employees? Will they need VPN access? What platforms are they using to connect? Can you verify that the endpoints are secure?
What is the anticipated volume of mail? In this day, it's often much cheaper to outsource to Google for smaller installations, but in some cases it makes a lot of sense to keep in-house.
When hosting your own web server how much downtime is acceptable? Do you need 24/7 uptime or will you have maintenance windows? What if your primary site burns to the ground? Do you have the floor space and adequate cooling? How much traffic is anticipated at the beginning of the project? How much do you expect to grow?
What applications do you need in-house? Accounting packages? Company intranet? Database? How will you separate your LAN for security purposes? Do you take credit cards as part of business?
What infrastructure applications do you need? Can you afford downtime on these? How many ports/switches do you need? Wireless? Separate backup LAN? OOB management for your servers?
Before you even start pricing hardware, find out what your customer needs and wants and willing to pay for.
Re:Don't buy any servers. Use the cloud. (Score:2, Informative)
GMail? Nothing wrong with that... as long as you don't mind all your internal memos being examined by data-mining software.
Not to mention state and federal laws (SOX, HIPAA) that require controlled access to certain information.
Re:Don't buy any servers. Use the cloud. (Score:3, Informative)
Amazon S3's website has a nice spiel on how to make HIPAA complaint web apps accessing it. Encrypting your data before putting it in the cloud isn't exactly rocket science.
Re:Don't buy any servers. Use the cloud. (Score:2, Informative)
Dual connections with different topologies and hardware fail over. It isn't that expensive.
Having said that, I still would hesitate to put core assets (or even email) in the cloud.
Re:Don't buy any servers. Use the cloud. (Score:3, Informative)
We use gmail for our company as well, and I have only recently hit the wall with it. I get a mew hundred MB of messages, and there is no method of deleting (or archiving) attachments off the system.
I am still surprised that there is no popular "appliance" type server for this purpose: something that supports file, print, authentication, accounting, and phone system out of the box. Go extra fancy and allow for painless mirroring and snapshot backups with a second (and third) unit if desired. It seems like at this point in time it shouldn't be that hard to do...
Re:Few things to consider (Score:3, Informative)
It's not very well known, but Apple will actually do on site repairs. Seriously, look in your AppleCare terms, it's in there. I've heard of people who know about it getting on site repairs with great success. They also allow you to mail in your repairs without going to an Apple Store.
Optionally, if you do have an on site IT department, you can get certified in doing your own repairs. Apple will send you a new part, you install, send back the old part.
That said, unless the office is already using Macs, don't buy Macs. I've had more trouble with converting offices only to have them get mad because a button in Excel moved 20 pixels to the right and suddenly their "mouse memory" doesn't work anymore. People like sameness, they may think switching to Macs is a good idea on paper, but make sure they really know what they're going into. This also applies to Linux conversions. And if it goes wrong, they will blame you, no matter how trivial the issues are.
(I've worked pretty extensively in Mac IT.)
Re:wow (Score:4, Informative)
Except SME Server has issues with Win 7.
Fixed in 8.0. I'm running it right now.
Great way to start off with headaches. Not to mention how unstable the product and company are.
Yeah, only 11 years of solid, steady progress. Best to wait another decade or so before it's ready, huh?
I wouldn't want to place a bet on that pony, even if it was someone else's money.
I did and I do. I work in the developing world, where the cost of failure is measured in people's livelihoods - and occasionally their lives. Even $1000 dollars can keep a family going for months. Getting basic infrastructure working matters a lot here, so I don't recommend things lightly.
SME Server was first used in production after the desolation of East Timor by the Indonesians. Dili, the capital, had been ruined. 80% of the existing infrastructure was damaged or destroyed. Oxfam Australia needed some way to keep their office running, and they chose the SME Server. It ran 3 offices, connecting them and managing their email using tiny bandwidth volumes and with NO local IT support.
Here in the developing country where I work, reliability and robustness matter. I've seen SME Servers left untended for periods as long as 18 months without incident. I don't base my recommendations on purest speculation. I actually profile things.
Re:Why do you want to keep webserver inhouse? (Score:3, Informative)
That's a myth. Clean agents displace about 5% of the air leaving oxygen concentrations just about what they were before the dump.
They work by disrupting the chemical process of fire, not by depleting oxygen. They are like an anti-catalyst.
You would eventually get a little lightheaded if you stayed in a room for too long after a clean agent dump, but you have a good 5-10 minutes to take your time to exit the area. Not that you want to stay in an area with a fire in the first place. The smoke is far more dangerous than the clean agent.
Re:Don't buy any servers. Use the cloud. (Score:1, Informative)
I am still surprised that there is no popular "appliance" type server for this purpose: something that supports file, print, authentication, accounting, and phone system out of the box
There is (though popular is debatable), if you disregard your "phone system" requirement: IBM's Lotus Foundations [lotusfoundations.com]. It's built with SuSE Studio, so you might be able to add install Asterisk on the same machine (depends on the support contract, I guess).
Go extra fancy and allow for painless mirroring and snapshot backups with a second (and third) unit if desired. It seems like at this point in time it shouldn't be that hard to do...
I suggest you look at Platespin Protect [novell.com] with Open Enterprise Server [novell.com]. For the hardware component, take a look at Platespin Forge.
Re:Do my job please. (Score:3, Informative)
Telecommute is the modern answer - you don't need an office.
Re:wow (Score:2, Informative)