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Best IT-infrastructure For a Small Company?

Posted by samzenpus on from the ground-up dept.

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."

2 of 600 comments (clear)

  1. Keep it simple by L473ncy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Keep the whole thing simple, the next person who comes in will thank you for it. Don't introduce any weird convoluted things into the system and make sure to make it so that the whole system is modular, easily upgradeable, and when the time comes and they need to expand that it's expansion friendly.

  2. Hire me? by digitalhermit · · 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.