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Best IT-infrastructure For a Small Company?
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."
Media server? How about S3. Web server? How about EC2. Seriously, why spend time and $ on procuring, powering, cooling, backing up, and upgrading all that gear? Give everyone a laptop and a gmail account. Put the rest in a public cloud.
Get a stable release of FreeNAS on commodity hardware. It will fit the bill for all of the features you are looking for. SMB for Windows clients, NFS for Linux/Unix/BSD, iSCSI targets and initiators, support for several raid cards and drive types, software raid control, several other features. http://freenas.org/
I tend to shy away from using laptops (even with docking stations and such) for primary machines. I'd go with regular desktops. The costs of upkeep and such will be more predictable that way. I don't prefer any one brand over another, but I typically tell my clients to stay away from Dells (because of all the issues with capacitors on motherboards over the last several years). My clients tend to go local, even if it costs a tad more, and those that do tend to be happier with their purchases.
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Basically, for 20 people, you're going to want to run an MS implementation with Dell PC's under a maintenance contract. Simple to implement and simple to manage, even if they get rid of you(which may not be in your best interest)
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."
No. but that's only because I'm not afraid of other people's opinions. I actually like trying to see things from others' point of view. It makes me better at my job.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
For mercy, sir!
You want to muck about with user training to get them to use OpenOffice? I know it's mostly compatible and lookey-likey with MS Office, but 'mostly' doesn't cut it with office workers. Office workers despise change, hate the unknown and will go into mutiny if you take the usual and replace it with something different just to save a little (OK, a lot of) money.
Dell server, DROBO filestore and a bunch of really cheap desktops will cover many usage needs.
Yes, I would most definitely go about such. At several hundred dollars -- at least -- per each full Office install, hm. Let's say $300, although I know for the full version it's more. So 20 x $300 = $6,000 which will buy a really, really nice Linux server.
AND, the workers will benefit a a result. Unlike MS Office, Open Office works on Windows, Linux, and OS X, so no matter what company they go to when they leave they will be able to fit right in. And it works with files other than Microsoft's, so it's more versatile. And it makes PDF files directly, which you have to pay for separately with MS solutions.
I could go on. Open Office would be my first choice for an office suite. I'm not just recommending it as some cheap compromise.
And if Oracle gets to messing around with it too much (or with MySQL for that matter), there are people who WILL just fork the codebase and continue on, leaving Oracle behind. That's what Open Source is all about. So despite recent complaints to Oracle, the future of Open Office (or it's functional equivalent) actually looks pretty stable.
If they had Open Office, then opening the file would not be an issue, would it? And its compatibility, as in reading and saving Word .doc files for example, is pretty darned good. Where it's not, it's generally in places where Microsoft does not conform to standards, like its completely non-standard use of bullets. That's not OO's fault.
If you need to send someone a file in Word format, you can. If you're not sure which version of Word they have, you can save it in Word 95 format. Or even Word 6.0. You choose.
(Is it absolutely 100% compatible with Word? No. But the software is a lot more compatible with international standards than Microsoft ever was. AND more compatible with others than even that non-standard "standard" that Microsoft tried to push off on everybody else by packing the committees. The fact is that there are now international standards that governments and corporations use. Is Open Office compatible with them? Yes. Is Microsoft? No.)
Video editing tools are very much individualistic. Are there more available for Windows than Linux? Yes. Are they better? Sometimes. Are they compatible? Hell, no. Very few of them are, Windows or Linux. They will often use CODECs for saving that almost nobody has for playing back. If you know how to use one piece of editing software, can you take that knowledge and switch to another? NO. Again, on Linux or Windows. They are all different and do things in their own quirky ways. So I will concede the point about availability, but as for "knowing how to use them", that's pretty much irrelevant. You learn each separate video editing program separately. That's the way they are.
And support is not so much a consideration, or shouldn't be. They have an in-house IT guy, remember? He's supposed to know what to do when something breaks. If your in-house IT guy is always calling external support, he's not earning his salary. I agree that he doesn't sound very experienced, and THAT is, indeed, a consideration. But it shouldn't be.
Because you don't want to upgrade your entire infrastructure every 3 years - you do half now, the other half in 18 months, the first half in 36 months, and so on. Most servers are depreciated on a 3 year schedule, scheduling upgrades every ~18 months allows you to achieve some level of stability without tossing it all out the window at the end of your cycle.
As far as "having enough bandwidth", that's why you do analysis: compare costs of your current bandwidth needs & expected growth with the cost of buying, implementing, and supporting your own infrastructure. He does not say that they are constantly streaming this video library, just that they have a very large one. It's very possible that there is very little active, continuous streaming that would soak up huge amounts of bandwidth.
It's a 20 person company. Do you really think he's going to have the proper power conditioning, cooling, and remote-access setup for lots of live servers for basic stuff like e-mail and chat?
Keep it as simple as possible. Don't use docking stations, as they will be useless the moment laptops change. Just have people use laptops. Bog standard local NTFS file server with Raid1 for safety, and backed up offsite. Use hosted exchange if they must have meeting requests, or Gmail if not. Chat over skype.
IT is not about finding the quirky, brilliant solution that configures *just so*. It's about finding the robust solutions that will continue to work pretty well more or less indefinitely. Intra-company communication via skype means that Skype is responsible for making sure the IM server stays up, not you. Or substitute gChat / your medium of choice. Obviously, if they're legally required to log you should bring that in-house.
In two years, the hardware will be a mess of different configurations. New people will want to bring in their own laptop. That carefully constructed network map with everyone allocated a specific IP tied to their login will be useless bunk. You will be on your second wireless router. A new hire has to be able to walk in with a laptop off the street, connect to your network as painlessly as possible, and go. Login to the intranet, the intranet has links to all the software they'll need, go. The router configurations are all DHCP, and where they aren't every bloody port and plug is labeled.
If your replacement had to replace something, could they? Could a new, slightly technical user set themselves up without paging you? KISS.
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