Moving data to the "Cloud"

peter212693

peter212693

peter212693

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We have a few customers at the moment who seem to be set on "moving to the cloud" Their basic vision is there will be a mapped network drive that everyone from 4 different offices access' but this is in the cloud.

The way I was thinking is a dedicated server or maybe some data centre space and a site to site VPN, is there any other better solutions you guys recommend?

The really annoying thing this is one customer in particular already has a fully licenced terminal server which remote offices use which works but this is not "cloud" so they want another option...
 
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Make sure your customer understand that 'the cloud' = 'someone else's computers'.
 
Thanks guys,

The issue with this is they are a very demanding customer that want everything to work exactly how they want it to as "everyone else has cloud and does it like this so why cant we" seems to be their comments at the moment so we are trying to advice on what would work as close to this. Dropbox and such wont really work too well as they would have 40+ users accessing the files so I presume there would be conflicts unlike a Windows Server environment which would force the file to open in read only and tell you who has it open?
 
I know on box you can mark a file as 'locked' whilst you're working on it, then unlock it when you're done.

Guessing all the other similar services have something like that too.
 
Don't put a Windows file share at the other end of a WAN link unless you hate yourself.

Your job is to tell them the way they want things set up won't work. You either need to move to a concept of your files being in Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive/whatever and people decide to sync a subset to their local machines, or you build up a set of distributed file servers kept in sync with DFSR, but then that's not really the cloud any more.
 
I've got a customer who sounds like this. The MD likes to throw around terms he's obviously read somewhere but doesn't understand them properly, so the context he uses the words just doesn't make sense.

Egnyte has a hybrid model which lets you sync on-premise storage to them for remote users. Wasn't cheap the last time I got pricing though.

https://www.egnyte.com/how-enterprise-file-services-works.html
 
I Am Cloud "cloud drive mapper"

Network drive straight to the users onedrive for business

If you also want local storage / backups then I think Microsoft are working on a version of onedrive sync to support server shares
 
Thanks everyone.

We will have to sit down with them and give them options with pros and cons of all options and see what they decide. The onedrive server shares would be ideal if that ever does come about.

I will have a look into egnyte to and see the pricing with them.
 
The "cloud" is just fancy sales talk. When people move to the "cloud" it just means the services (desktop, email, storage, published apps etc) are located else where (some times on shared hardware, sometimes on dedicated hardware) that is remotely accessible over the internet or over VPN.

Had to add this :D

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MW
 
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Unfortunately marketing has meant that "we host it" and "colocation" are now commonly referred to as the cloud.
 
When my boss got all excited about "the cloud" I asked if he wanted public or private - of course the word private got his attention. So I said how about this:

Host it here for speed, and at one of the regional offices for redundancy.

Good idea he said.

We already do that I said.
 
Private cloud is bit more than just having a server in your offices, but again I blame marketing for that.

'Cloud' is all about automation, scaling, being entirely decoupled from the underlying hardware, building applications that self-heal and can handle entire nodes just falling offline etc., and most importantly a concept of multi-tenant - whether that is per client or per department if you are just doing this inside your organisation. Along with that multi-tenant approach is the idea of recording usage data, either for billing or just to be able to say "marketing use 40% of all our available compute, and 80% of our storage IOPS" and justify building the environment out further.

Running VMware with some domain controllers that you need to prod if they have an issue isn't cloud.
 
I laugh at these organisations moving their data to the cloud then wondering why its slow when they have 500 users on a 50mbit connection trying to access their data.

The internet bandwidth is just not fast enough to make cloud usage viable performance wise. You are only creating a bottleneck.

Where i work they are set on moving to a regional datacenter model, instead of all on site. First site they did was hong kong where they have a gigabit point to point with the datacenter and users noticed a slowness right away and latency increased as expected.

Even worse the bosses realizes that they need some things local like print server and DC and some other servers and in their wisdom they want to put all the local servers on one esxi host. haha So if that fails they lose printing and the everything thats on it and they have a slow mail and document management access because its all going over one gigabit point to point link.

It will be even worse in regions where gigabit point to point is too expensive. For example in the middle east they wanted over £100k per year for a 100mbit point to point.
 
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