Hybrid Office 365/On Site Server

[satanicguardian]

Hi guys, I was looking for some advice with regards to one of my customers.

About a year ago I moved them onto an office 365 solution which was purely reliant on cloud/internet connectivity. It worked fine to start with but it soon became apparent that their ADSL connection was not sufficient to support them and it costs and arm and a leg to get a leased line into their office.

The main sticking point is that this company uses a lot of auto cad, DWG, large images and PDF's, meaning that there are considerable delays trying to open these files from sharepoint, and even more so trying to upload them.

I was looking at setting up a small in house server for hosting their large amounts of data so it can be accessed, edited and saved very quickly, but also have some kind of failover/failsafe backup as their documents are vital to everything they do! I was thinking perhaps integrating it with the existing sharepoint online, but the issue with that is that their internet still isn't really ideal for support an offsite back. Perhaps a manual offsite back up (External HDD weekly?)

In short, I need some recommendation on the sort of hardware/software/structure that would work best for them. At present they have standalone PC's that log directly onto themselves and gather everything else via office 365, would a fileserver require them to have to log onto a domain? I'd rather keep the emails in the cloud if possible, not a fan of offline exchange!

Thanks in advance!

Jamie

 

[satanicguardian]

Hi mate, I should have mentioned that the CAD stuff wasn't the majority of anything, it's MOSTLY giant pdf's (and lots of them) I just wanted to move this large quantity of data onto something that would provide faster access, I don't want to overcomplicate if I can avoid it!

 

[satanicguardian]

Something like a HP MicroServer? could fill it with a few terabytes of hard drives and connect it to the local network and they can save all their files to this server?

You could setup individual folders for private files for each user, folders for files which are public and so on.
In terms of access speed depending on budget you could utilise SSD's, running CAT6 cables and so forth and this would be very quick and reliable.

You can set up RAID as an onsite backup solution, put in place a system where it backs up to SharePoint every so often and also put in place as you say a system which images the main hard drives to an external which is kept offsite.

Keep your email's and so on in the cloud with office 365 but just use this system for the files.

This is more along the lines of what I was thinking, I could quite easily do a custom server build myself surely - I don't think it's going to need a huge amount of processing power since it will just be used to transfer data, perhaps a high quality NIC card, a fast 1TB ssd + a WD Green or something as a mirror on site?

Basically I need the most reliable yet quick system for the users to open, modify and save documents whilst the documents are still safe and backed up, there's so many options!

 

[satanicguardian]

Jamie,

The giant PDF really are not going to help. Might be worth speaking to them about the level of details. Architects like to put the most detail they can on it, down to the thread on a screw. This will just balloon the size of the PDF and as my CAD manager mate said to our users "hairy assed builders don't give a dam about that level of detail"

Sorry just seen this! It's not so much building they do, I'm not even sure how to describe it.. it's kind of planning, budgeting and installing fittings for kitchens, hotels, restaurants etc and evaluating health and safety, hence blueprints and lots of pdfs and images