Server for Architect's practice.

jezscott

jezscott

jezscott

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Location
North London, UK
I've been reading around servers recently and I'm still not sure what to do.

We are small architectural practice with just 5 of us working from our home, however in 6 months we are moving to an office and may expand to more than double.

We work on fairly large graphics intensive files, our email etc is through gmail, we need remote access and we scan all documentation that comes in to the office, so we need full text searchable indexing of PDFs.

We currently use an old PC with WHSv1 and a mixture of different sized HDDs.
As well as our office files, this also holds our music photos and recordings from our HTPC. This machine is old and slow and remote access is poor.

For future home use, I was thinking of a simple NAS or WHS'2011. However, for the office I need something more powerful.

Perhaps a simple NAS box, such as the Qnap TS-879 Pro Turbo would suffice. Or I build/buy a DIY pedestal server with a variant of Windows Server 2008 R2. Or both.

I even started looking into remote desktops using a Dell PowerEdge M610x Blade Server with a ATI FirePro V9800P for 3D & graphics (I'd like to see this sort of thing in person)

Can anyone point me in the right direction? It would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond in detail!

There's no IT admin to manage our network, just me, and my time is limited. I would like to find a local consultant to help setup our network, and provide occasional support.

I'm sure one day, graphics intensive virtual desktops will be simpler to setup and manage in the future.

I had been looking at both the HP and Dell servers recently. Quite a range of spec to consider. They do look expensive when compared to a standard PC. I assume that is down to the reliability of the parts used and hopefully the support.

We're using about 4Tb storage, includes folder duplication and backup to internal HDD. We do need to think about storage and locating the files that we access frequently on to the faster storage.

Our main CAD software Vectorworks can install on 2 PCs (eg work/home). We have some software (not graphics intensive),which we rarely use and is installed on a separate PC for people to remote desktop onto as required. Should this be a virtual desktop on the server for each? or virtual application?

Hotdesking would be very useful as half of us are currently part time and we may take on other architects on a project by project basis. We are already thinking who is going to be sharing which workstation this year as space is limited until we move office.

For hotdesking, what is installed on the client workstation? Is the whole OS, desktop and software downloaded from the server each time a user logs in? Or is the OS, software, drivers etc located on the server as a remote hard disk? I wonder if our software licenses are compatible with hotdesking.

Reliable and fast remote access to a workstation over the internet would allow our part time architects to access the software from home on days when it wouldn't be worth the time spent travelling into our office. When I'm on construction sites, I could do with access to my workstation from an iPad or the site laptop.

I've not thought about wether our email/contacts/calendar should be on cloud or local server. Seems a waste to have a capable server and then pay for a remote one. Same with remote backing up of the server, I was thinking of backing up to our home server (and vice versa).
 
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Thanks guys, I got your info.

I'll get a Dell or HP, but would still really appreciate a bit more advice on general hardware/software specification.
 
Thanks Aspirin, that looks ideal.
I'm going to total up the cost, but should be fine.

Was wondering if Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard would allow more flexibility than SBS 2011?
 
Our current server is really bad, so temporarily I just spent £800 on:
HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer
2x Kingston 4GB DDR3 1066MHz Memory Non-ECC CL7 1.5V
4x Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB Hard Drive SATAII 64MB Cache - OEM Caviar Green
Windows Home Server 2011
I will use this as our Home Server for when we move out of the house into the office.

For the office server, £7k is over budget really. Its the SAS hard disks that seem to be the major cost. Also, I need to understand the software, SBS 2011, Premium addon, VMware, Symantic recovery seems to be about £2k would I need the premium addon as well as VMware?
 
Was hoping £3k, but depends what I get pushing it higher.

The ML350 G6 looks highly expandable, what's the minimum I could start with?

Eg.
£1500 Server
£550 Win SBS 2011 5 CALs
£200 extra 5 CALs
£800? mix SATA (~4TB least accessed files) & SAS (~1TB frequently accessed files) to maximise cost performance?
what ML350 G6 integrated components need upgrading?

£195? Symantec recovery, does SBS provide a limited facility for this?
£380? VMware, is this instead of Premium Add on? is there an alternative?
£850? Premium Add on 5 CALs, do I need this for remote desktop?
£250? extra 5 CALs

To back up server, can I back up to my HP Microserver at home over Internet? Or would Mozy etc. be better?
 
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So, since you all last helped with my server specification, I have made a few hasty purchases. Where initially I wanted one server, I unintentionally now have the parts for three physical servers to divide between office and home.

I haven't decided how to divide up the hardware, or what configuration to put the hard drives in. I would like to install a free hypervisor on each of these, not sure exactly what virtual servers I should setup.

I'm sure there are one or two more things I need to get to get the most out of this stuff.

HP ML100 G6:, Xeon X3450, 16Gb ECC UDIMM
HP ProLiant Essentials Lights Out 100i Advanced Pack
2x OWC Multi-mount 3.5" to 5.25" bracket set
(Can fit 7 standard 3.5" HDD & 1 LP 3.5" HDD)

HP Microserver N40L:, 8Gb non-ECC
HP Micro Server Remote Access Card Kit
OWC Multi-mount 3.5" to 5.25" bracket set
(Modified to fit 7 standard 3.5" HDD)

Supermicro X8SIL-F:, Xeon X3450, 32Gb ECC RDIMM
includes 2x Gigabit NIC & IPMI 2.0 KVM
Old ATX Case + Corsair VX 450W
Supermicro CSE-M35T1 5 Bay SATA Hot Swap Rack
(Can fit 9 standard 3.5" HDD)

Other:
HP ROK Microsoft Windows SBS 2011 Standard + 5 extra user CALs
Kaspersky Small Office Security Software 5 PCs and 1 FileServer 1 Year + 5 extra PCs
2x Microsoft Windows Home Server 2011 64-Bit, OEM

HP NC382T PCIe Dp Gigabit Server Adapter
Highpoint RocketRAID 2720SGL 8x SATA
Highpoint Rocket 620 2x SATA
BlackGold BGT3650 Quad DVB-T2/DVB-C
HP PROCURVE SWITCH 1800-24G (for link aggregation)
HP PROCURVE SWITCH 1810-8G (for link aggregation)
HP PROCURVE SWITCH 1410-8G

Hard disks: (new & salvaged)
6x 2TB Western Digital WD20EARS
1x 2TB Seagate Barracuda ST32000542AS LP
3x 750Gb Western Digital Caviar Green WD7500AACS
1x 750Gb Western Digital Caviar Blue WD7500AAKS
2x 640Gb Western Digital Caviar Blue WD6400AAKS
1x 500Gb Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS
1x 500Gb Samsung SpinPoint F3 HD502HJ
1x 320Gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS
2x 250Gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250620AS
2x 250Gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250310AS
2x 250Gb Seagate Barracuda 250Gb 7200.12 LP
Western Digital My Book 2TB USB 3.0 External
Western Digital My Book 1TB eSATA USB2.0 External
StarTech eSATA USB to SATA External HDD Dock
 
Sounds good to me.
At the moment the office and our home is the same building, I was thinking of setting up the Microserver at a family members house near by as an offsite FTP?
In about 6 months, we will be out in a separate office, so I could use our home server as the offsite backup & vice-versa (and take server out of family members house).
Although the supermicro has 32gb, the ML110-G6 16Gb is mainly HP hardware & ROK software for compatibility etc.
For home server use, a server would be for storage of media, ripped blurays etc, shared quad tuner, on the fly video conversion.
2x 250Gb raid 1 for system disks sounds good.
6x 2Tb in Raid 10 is plenty of storage for the office
 
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