Multi site business server solution with redundancy

[Talay]

I need a solution to cover at least 4 sites with up to around 15 users who might need to access the same information (files in Word, Excel, Graphics etc.) but also some users need different access rights to certain areas (or have areas where they can't access or see).

I also need a back up fit for 2018.

Currently I run one small HP server with 4 x 3GB of HDD (WD Red / Black) but these are now around 5 years old and I think time has come to retire them.

Offsite is provided by Crashplan which worked for the only one time we needed to restore a failed HDD (which was in a PC and not on the server).

Open to ideas, hardware and locations. Ideally I'd like mirror backups in tow locations and then some cloud storage. I'd like it automated and with versioning (grandfather, father, son etc.) so we can recall if possible.

I don't expect it free but don't think it should cost mega bucks. Am I right ?

 

[DG web consultancy]

Can get a NAS like a drobo or synology at a decent spec for around £600 depending on specific requirements.

Does it have to be private or you considering something cloud based? I know livedrive sounds like could be a good fit for your needs, although not specifically sure about versioning (I know it supports about 30 file versions over 30 days).

 

[Talay]

Isn't a NAS a single site backup or extended HDD utility rather than a central source to store collaborative documents etc. ?

I am trying to move from items being stored on single PCs and a server being used as backup to all documents being stored on a server and that server being backed up physically in another location and also in the cloud.

 

[ffox]

I need a solution to cover at least 4 sites with up to around 15 users who might need to access the same information (files in Word, Excel, Graphics etc.)

You could use something like this -
http://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/wd-my-cloud-setup-performance-verdict-page-2

It's a NAS with remote connectivity. You would have to configure the security yourself to allow/restrict access to folders.

Personally, I would use Office 365, then you wouldn't need servers or bulk storage devices at all. Access to data is controlled through simple to use Azure Active Directory setup.

 

[DG web consultancy]

Isn't a NAS a single site backup or extended HDD utility rather than a central source to store collaborative documents etc. ?

I am trying to move from items being stored on single PCs and a server being used as backup to all documents being stored on a server and that server being backed up physically in another location and also in the cloud.

Not all NAS's work the same. Like ffox mentioned you can get them with remote access over the internet. Depending on what you get they also support mirroring so you have redundant backups (assuming the NAS isn't destroyed though some support cloud storage).

 

[Talay]

...
Personally, I would use Office 365, then you wouldn't need servers or bulk storage devices at all. Access to data is controlled through simple to use Azure Active Directory setup.

I guess this is part of the crux of the idea and whether the function of businesses buying all the hardware, spending time sorting it all out and maintaining it etc. is actually worth it when we could, theoretically, use online from the get go.

Windows Home Server was largely made redundant by Win 10 I seem to recall as Windows can not do all that stuff. Add in some cloud storage and maybe this is way forward ?

It would be quite a step but it would make absolute sense in so many ways.

 

[ffox]

It would be quite a step but it would make absolute sense in so many ways

It doesn't have to be a single large step. You can migrate to an Office 365, or G-Suite environment in stages and commit when your business is comfortable.

You don't mention what email platform you use. If you have your own mail server, this may be your largest step change and would need planning carefully. File storage can be done in stages.

Take care to choose with care between G-Suite and Office 365. Many will advise you that the deliverables are the same or similar. If all you will ever need is email, Office apps and file storage, this is probably true enough, but they work in very different ways. Office 365 delivers enterprise data security that far exceeds that of G-Suite.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

I would suggest you contact a leasing company like Hardsoftcomputers for a quote, We used them for installation of a server full setup and 24/7/365 maintenance and repair all in a very respectable price and the equipment is yours after the lease period , for only one extra monthly payment

They and other companies are experts doing this, including multi site and being lease all equipment is new and payments are spread out monthly helping cashflow

I don't work for them just used them with my old company and found excellent service. with 99% of any bugs we had sorted out by them online rather than waiting for a engineer to drive over

 

[Russ Michaels]

For the document sharing, you have a solution built right into Windows called Onedrive.
Your users can all sync the files to their own machines and they are stored in the cloud. Or you could restrict it to the web interface only.
There are also various other options available, most popular being the likes of GoogleDrive, DropBox. Although I would recommend you review the features and options of each solution rather than rely on any biased opinions about which is best.

For your backup needs, I would suggest looking at VEEAM. The veeam endpoint backup for physical devices is FREE. The paid licenses are for virtual machines.
If you install hyper-V components and converted your server to a virtual machine (veeam can do this for you too), then you would have the luxury of being able to backup that VM and restore is pretty much anywhere.
VEEAM has this live recovery mode, where it restores an image smartly by recovering only the bare minimum needed to run, and then restores the rest in the background on-demand. So you can literally have a machine back up and running within minutes rather than hours.

Another option is Acronis backup, which will allow you to seed backup locally and to the cloud, and can also restore images as a VM to a local hypervisor or to Azure.
I also use SolarWinds backup solution to do the same, although it is not quite as flexible with the restore options.

 

[Talay]

It doesn't have to be a single large step. You can migrate to an Office 365, or G-Suite environment in stages and commit when your business is comfortable.

You don't mention what email platform you use. If you have your own mail server, this may be your largest step change and would need planning carefully. File storage can be done in stages.

Take care to choose with care between G-Suite and Office 365. Many will advise you that the deliverables are the same or similar. If all you will ever need is email, Office apps and file storage, this is probably true enough, but they work in very different ways. Office 365 delivers enterprise data security that far exceeds that of G-Suite.

Thanks.

We use G-Suite for email, through our own [email protected] etc. and Windows 10 Enterprise for an operating system.

I find Outlook needs way more "thought" and "maintenance" than Gmail. Perhaps that is only my perception and I know Outlook does much more but when you use G-Suite for email, integration with Outlook is bad and you end up with multiple copies of messages, no consistency of status updates on messages etc.

 

[Talay]

I would suggest you contact a leasing company like Hardsoftcomputers for a quote, We used them for installation of a server full setup and 24/7/365 maintenance and repair all in a very respectable price and the equipment is yours after the lease period , for only one extra monthly payment

They and other companies are experts doing this, including multi site and being lease all equipment is new and payments are spread out monthly helping cashflow

I don't work for them just used them with my old company and found excellent service. with 99% of any bugs we had sorted out by them online rather than waiting for a engineer to drive over

I'm not sure that another set of hardware is the way forward and we don't need financing for such items. For sure there is a lot of hand holding and someone to call when things go wrong and that might be part of what we need but if the cloud has replaced networks and backups, why on earth go back to site based physical equipment ?

 

[Talay]

For the document sharing, you have a solution built right into Windows called Onedrive.
Your users can all sync the files to their own machines and they are stored in the cloud. Or you could restrict it to the web interface only.
There are also various other options available, most popular being the likes of GoogleDrive, DropBox. Although I would recommend you review the features and options of each solution rather than rely on any biased opinions about which is best.

For your backup needs, I would suggest looking at VEEAM. The veeam endpoint backup for physical devices is FREE. The paid licenses are for virtual machines.
If you install hyper-V components and converted your server to a virtual machine (veeam can do this for you too), then you would have the luxury of being able to backup that VM and restore is pretty much anywhere.
VEEAM has this live recovery mode, where it restores an image smartly by recovering only the bare minimum needed to run, and then restores the rest in the background on-demand. So you can literally have a machine back up and running within minutes rather than hours.

Another option is Acronis backup, which will allow you to seed backup locally and to the cloud, and can also restore images as a VM to a local hypervisor or to Azure.
I also use SolarWinds backup solution to do the same, although it is not quite as flexible with the restore options.

If we used One Drive or Google Drive, why would we then also need a backup of the physical machine ?

I take the point that if say you had a fire, you could go to anywhere else and get a VM running but wouldn't that simply be true of powering up a laptop and being able to access the centralised files in the cloud ?

 

[Chris Ashdown]

There is nothing special about any cloud service, at the end of the day it's just a link to another company's server, and one thing you are never assured of is that if will remain free or not have far higher rates at a later date
You can have your own "cloud service" based at home easily enough if that's what you are after

 

[KM-Tiger]

You can have your own "cloud service" based at home easily enough if that's what you are after

You can indeed.

Nextcloud is well worth a look.

 

[ffox]

We use G-Suite for email, through our own [email protected] etc. and Windows 10 Enterprise for an operating system.

As you already have G-Suite and prefer the email platform to Outlook, your best option at this point would be to make greater use of those tools and reduce the need for internal servers.

Start by migrating some of your server shares to Google Drive. You can lock down access using Google Admin. I would recommend a small steps approach with plenty of communication across the user base. And listen to and attend to the user feedback.

You will find that with careful change management you will end up with a really workable system and no internal servers. You can use Google Cloud Search to locate documents and files by content and name, even when documents have been misfiled.

If we used One Drive or Google Drive, why would we then also need a backup of the physical machine ?

I would always recommend a local physical backup of critical files. I would also recommend that this is incremental. In the event (unlikely but possible) of Internet failure, your business can still operate on local files.

There is nothing special about any cloud service, at the end of the day it's just a link to another company's server,

That is incorrect. It's true that most cloud services are computer file stores, but G-Suite and O365 offer much more. The SaaS office apps on both deliver huge potential savings on client software installation, licencing and maintenance. Google Admin and O365 Admin offer central control over data security and DLP. O365 even has a fully GDPR compliant Security and Compliance control panel.

 

[Talay]

There is nothing special about any cloud service, at the end of the day it's just a link to another company's server, and one thing you are never assured of is that if will remain free or not have far higher rates at a later date
You can have your own "cloud service" based at home easily enough if that's what you are after

Fair point but I can count in minutes the amount of time my primary internet has been offline in the last decade and with mobile backup, there has never been a time when we could not access anything on a cloud based platform.

Equally though, if using a remote server, you are at the behest of the same internet connection to access your files in a physical location, plus you are paying for the hardware as well.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

That's true but with desktop software you can still keep working at locations and as seen before the larger the company the more at risk it is for attracting hackers and using data obtained with each user giving a lot of information of who they are and where they work among other things like log on off times who they email and so on

 

[ffox]

That's true but with desktop software you can still keep working at locations

That's true enough, but Google Apps can be used with Chrome when no Internet connection is available, Office 365 Apps (Word, Excel Etc) can be installed on client machines, you can even use Libre Office locally installed if you want and have current files and documents stored locally. It all depends on how it's setup. That will be determined by the methods of work used by a particular business and what the business needs are.

as seen before the larger the company the more at risk it is for attracting hackers and using data obtained with each user giving a lot of information of who they are and where they work among other things like log on off times who they email and so on

This is a vote in favour of G-Suite or O365 as both have much higher levels of security than any local area network that is Internet connected.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

That's true enough, but Google Apps can be used with Chrome when no Internet connection is available, Office 365 Apps (Word, Excel Etc) can be installed on client machines, you can even use Libre Office locally installed if you want and have current files and documents stored locally. It all depends on how it's setup. That will be determined by the methods of work used by a particular business and what the business needs are.



This is a vote in favour of G-Suite or O365 as both have much higher levels of security than any local area network that is Internet connected.

But less lightly to be a target

 

[ffox]

But less lightly to be a target

Sorry Chris, but I don't quite follow that.

 

[Ilyas Mohammed]

Hi Tally

I have been in the IT industry for many years now and we used to sell quite a bit of hardware to all our customers, they all use to have all their services on site, Exchange Email on premise, Documents on premises, backups on premise. An average install including hardware and software for O/s and backups for 20 users would be a up to 8K or more then you have to look at yearly subscriptions Veeam or Symantec Backupexc to get support in case you have an issue with the backup and that you need to get updates, so there is another cost. We have been though the NAS scenario but then you need to makes sure that you have some level of support with that just in case the hardware fails plus its very messy. Synology and Netgear have connectors or apps that connect to Google drive and One drive but then there is another issue there that you have to make sure that you monitor the files that sync and if you have weird file names with characters in them then One drive will ignore them Google drive isn't so bad. The alternative to this is keep the server you are using stick some warranty on it about £200 per year 9/5 5 days week or a little more for 24/7. This server just needs to be used for machine authentication, rest put in the cloud O365 £4.00 per user 1TB of space for each user. This will take the load and give you contingency to move away from hardware failure. sync you local files if you want to One drive give access to all users using Ms Azure and SharePoint you could implement permissions so that each user or group only has access to what you want them to. You could add a connector to the server and export all your AD to the cloud. Then purchase a backup solution with someone reliable 1TB of space would be about £75.00 it would use compression so you would get more space then then you have files you could add as much retention as you want 15 days i think is fine. All users could have access to email and files whilst out and about should the Beast form the East should return no user has any excuse to work or at least answer their emails. If you want to take it further then put your phone system in the cloud 3CX access any calls from anyone on any device it call back using the office number.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

Do not buy a Drobo, they are good but if anything goes wrong the recovery will be very expensive( min £1000+ ) . Get a couple WD EX4 Cloud NAS or EX2 depending on your req. they have build in off site sync as part of the OS and remote access. They work fine with 15 users each site do not cost a fortune and are easy enough to set up. Do not fit them with Seagate drives or the WD 3TB Red, 2 and 4TB WD REd's are fine. On the 3TB I noticed a high failure rate.

 

[Talay]

I should add that all our front end EPoS is hosted and if it goes down, we go back to the stone age

However, we do not need or indeed use any other software which is business critical so if email, hosted documents etc. all went down, we would be fine in the short term.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

So that alone confirms the need for a local server at each location and a master at base for uploading ne prices, products and end of day sales

 

[ffox]

I should add that all our front end EPoS is hosted and if it goes down, we go back to the stone age

Is that 1 EPoS per site? Where are the data sources? One each site with replication, or centrally at one location?

 

[Talay]

So that alone confirms the need for a local server at each location and a master at base for uploading ne prices, products and end of day sales

Er.. no !

All in real time. the backup is internet connection, which is why we have multiple options. Servers hosting in USA are not Micky Mouse but with multiple site redundancy across USA/EU/SIN.

 

[Talay]

Is that 1 EPoS per site? Where are the data sources? One each site with replication, or centrally at one location?

Not sure I understand. It is the same hosted EPoS across the whole company but with multiple terminals at each location.

 

[ffox]

Where is the DB that the EPoS terminals write to hosted?

 

[Talay]

Where is the DB that the EPoS terminals write to hosted?

USA, with backups in EU and SIN.

 

[ffox]

Okay, so cloud based. Given the number of users and sites, plus the fact that your most critical IT function is already Internet dependant, there is little sense in using local servers.

I would still replicate critical data to a local store though.

 

[Talay]

Okay, so cloud based. Given the number of users and sites, plus the fact that your most critical IT function is already Internet dependant, there is little sense in using local servers.

I would still replicate critical data to a local store though.

You hit the nail on the head. The risk profiling on whether to elect for cloud based EPoS has already been done and yet the backups are currently a generation behind and it seems to me to make little sense to simply renew but to move on.

I take your point about a local store but presumably rather than back up to the cloud, we could back up from the cloud in reverse.

 

[ffox]

I take your point about a local store but presumably rather than back up to the cloud, we could back up from the cloud in reverse.

Absolutely. G-Suite and Office 365 both deliver excellent cloud/local client replication engines. Too many users replicate everything to every local client. That is too much.

Provided that you have good Internet connectivity, the secret of success with Cloud is to restrict replication to user client machines. They can access the files and documents through the browser, and if they are using SaaS office applications, this is quicker than firing up a local Word Processor or Spreadsheet application.

Use replication to copy critical files on a continuous basis to a dedicated machine (PC) on one of your sites and use either a shell script, or backup software to take incremental snapshots of the data and store it on a device that can be taken off site for safety.

The incremental backup model means that you have a roll back to any point in time should you need it and storing the files locally on removable media means that you add additional security to the model.

 

[EmC007]

I might be missing something here however a real simple solution is place everything, data, applications, email and people in one central location and this can be achieved through Microsoft Remote Desktop Services. I have been doing this for SME's now for over 15 years and it is how I operate our business. In fact, I am writing this in Chrome whilst logged into our Remote Desktop Server from my home whilst connected to a standard business broadband connection installed by our company. It is simple, backed up and has all the security you could hope for and in a few weeks, we will be able to add Artificial Intelligence Anti Virus to it as well to keep out all the real Internet nasties.