I recently moved into a new position as company IT Manager at a local Architects. We only have around 20 members of staff but deal with large volumes of email and huge file sizes due to the nature of our business.
Everyone works mainly from shared directories on our Small Business Server 2003 Premium, Hp Proliant 3Ghz 1Gb Server.
As it is SBS it is our Domain controller, DHCP Server, File Server and handles our routing and DNS.
Obviously this is a risky game as if it failed for whatever reason then we would not be abled to do anything till it was fix or an interim solution was done.
If I need to do maintenance and take the server offline people can’t print, access the internet or access their files.
I fell the sensible thing to do here is to break it up. Also to buy a 2nd identical server so I can at least test that our backups restore ok. Also gives us something to turn to should the original server die.
I also want to use a linux box for routing, dns and dhcp so that if the server goes down we can at least access the internet.
Next I want to use a NAS for archived documents to ease some more of the burdon on the server.
Last but not least I want to either out source exchange to a company or at least ensure we have a 2nd server to run exchange on should the orginal server go down.
Any thoughts on this? Can anyone suggest if this is the correct way to do this or can come up with a better idea?
I am also considering replacing our current cisco pix firewall with linux smoothwall. And using SME server for DHCP, DNS and routing.
Money is tight so it’s an ebay job unfortunately.
If money was no option then I would have at least 2 clustered servers and possible using Virtual servers for some of the services.
I simply want to be able to allow access to the file server and exchange server should the server go down. At the moment that is impossible without a 2nd server.
