Badly need advice

[Quickstrike]

Hi, I work in BI in a Canadian university.
I need someone who knows about infrastructure to tell me if my solution is feasible.

I don't know crap about servers and I need guidance.

We mainly deliver on demand reports and manage what the old integrated management system can't manage, using multiple sources of data.  Data sources are the antiquated integrated management system that on it's way out, lots of Access Data files located on a file server and various SQL servers instances.
For portability and ease of use, the final products are usually Excel spreadsheets and we store those and the source data on a file server.

We have three major issues.
To compensate for the file server slowness, we copy critical data on encrypted local drive. This makes IT security uneasy. They want us to secure and remote desktop our PC to make sure a PC theft doesn't result in a data breach. 

Our second issue is our IT department is phasing out the file servers to migrate to Sharepoint. The file servers performances are degrading and there is no hope of getting better service as this is the way they (IT) found to push us on Sharepoint.

Sharepoint doesn't play well with a lot of our data sources (most of them Access files maintained with scripts and ETL software). We need working a file server otherwise my (mission critical) service will collapse. IT infrastructure don't really care about our needs.

Finally, our SQL server powering our data mart is woefully underpowered.

It's to the point where productivity is taking a hit so we need to invest to manage the problem.

We have space (about 14 foot by 3 by 10) that's can be secured, so enough space for a few racks. The space can be ventilated.

Noise is an issue as the space is next to an office so we can't have blowiematrons of full blast 24/7

I need a rack or a cabinet
I need to support file sharing for a few (7) workstation with a data volume similar to video editing.
I need To mount 7 PCs 
I need bare metal to run a SQL server
Plus supporting power and network equipment

 

I was thinking getting a 42U rack, 2u pc cases for the 7 PCs, Some second hand server for our SQL and a NAS box.
All this needs to be reasonably quiet

What am I forgetting? What would you recommend?

 

 

[unijab]

3 hours ago, Quickstrike said:

about 14 foot by 3 by 10

 

I don't think you'll have the power or cooling requirements in that small space for a 42u rack...let alone more than one rack

[Electronics Wizardy]

This feels like a IT should set this up for you type of issue. Why isn't IT doing this? Id complain to mangement until you get IT to do this. You don't want to work around IT, its just ugly when that happens.

 

Do you have a budget? 

 

I wouldn't go DIY here, Id just get dell/hp/lenovo systems. Much less hassle normally. Not worth the cost to do DIY.

 

 

[Quickstrike]

11 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

This feels like a IT should set this up for you type of issue. Why isn't IT doing this? Id complain to mangement until you get IT to do this. You don't want to work around IT, its just ugly when that happens.

 

Do you have a budget? 

 

I wouldn't go DIY here, Id just get dell/hp/lenovo systems. Much less hassle normally. Not worth the cost to do DIY.

 

 

We're not bypassing IT per say.

 

IT is going to install and support our metal but there is a lack will or knowhow to get us properly outfitted. Our IT is great at managing regular infrastructure, office computers for secretaries, teachers and assistants but the second they have to deal with power users or to be proactive, they look like deer in headlights. They've been lacking in leadership forever (hence the 30+ years old integrated management system). They also have a history of making unilateral decisions while ignoring actual needs and ending up squandering time and money on poor execution and lack of foresight.

Management isn't better much better at understanding our needs, they want the sausage, not to know what we need to make the sausage. As long as there is no major fire, they are hands off.

 

We've solicited bids to have consultant help us built an infrastructure but nobody showed any interest. So we're stuck at dying a slow death choked by poor equipment or try something. Trying something is usually how things get done here so that's why I'm here.

Budget is around 20K, keep in mind we're a school so some equipment we can get a very low cost and we're not above buying used gear.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, Quickstrike said:

We're not bypassing IT per say.

 

IT is going to install and support our metal but there is a lack will or knowhow to get us properly outfitted. Our IT is great at managing regular infrastructure, office computers for secretaries, teachers and assistants but the second they have to deal with power users or to be proactive, they look like deer in headlights. They've been lacking in leadership forever (hence the 30+ years old integrated management system). They also have a history of making unilateral decisions while ignoring actual needs and ending up squandering time and money on poor execution and lack of foresight.

Management isn't better much better at understanding our needs, they want the sausage, not to know what we need to make the sausage. As long as there is no major fire, they are hands off.

 

We've solicited bids to have consultant help us built an infrastructure but nobody showed any interest. So we're stuck at dying a slow death choked by poor equipment or try something. Trying something is usually how things get done here so that's why I'm here.

Budget is around 20K, keep in mind we're a school so some equipment we can get a very low cost and we're not above buying used gear.

This really feels like get Management to get IT to do this for you. Id keep telling management about these issues.

 

19 hours ago, Quickstrike said:

To compensate for the file server slowness, we copy critical data on encrypted local drive. This makes IT security uneasy. They want us to secure and remote desktop our PC to make sure a PC theft doesn't result in a data breach. 

 

This shouldn't be a security issue. If setup right, it really won't be. security issue.

 

Or just store the data on the nas and access it from workstations, do you need to put the workstations in a rack

 

How much storage do you need in a nas? Id probably just get a server from dell or the like, run a vm for the nas use, run a vm for the sql server.

 

[Quickstrike]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

This really feels like get Management to get IT to do this for you. Id keep telling management about these issues.

Sadly not how universities work.

Also, should and is are two different things. I just have to open the thrash bin on a colleague's PC and find a boatload of data.

We don't need that much, maybe 20 terabytes, but it has to be highly available. A VM might do it if we have enough network and disk access to limit bottlenecks. 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, Quickstrike said:

Also, should and is are two different things. I just have to open the thrash bin on a colleague's PC and find a boatload of data.

How would putting the workstations on a rack affect this? Just tell the users to store data on the nas shares, not on their pc. If you want to enforce this you can use redirected users folders for their home files are on the nas, and they don't have permissions to store on the local PC

 

4 minutes ago, Quickstrike said:

We don't need that much, maybe 20 terabytes, but it has to be highly available. A VM might do it if we have enough network and disk access to limit bottlenecks. 

 

Yea a simple tower server should do this. Have a vm for sql and a file server. 

 

What speed is your network?

[Quickstrike]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

 

What speed is your network?

Gigabyte. The problem is mostly the server latency.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Quickstrike said:

Gigabyte. The problem is mostly the server latency.

WHat do you mean by latency? This shouldn't really be a issue on a local network for file sharing. You can go ssd, but it won't help much normally for a gigabit nas.

[Quickstrike]

7 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

WHat do you mean by latency? This shouldn't really be a issue on a local network for file sharing. You can go ssd, but it won't help much normally for a gigabit nas.

The server is slow to respond, like high latency RAM, it take a long time for it to respond a command like open a file. Like I tried to copyu local files, the progress bar takes a good two seconds to start moving. It's probably a virtualized windows server machine on old metal). Like I said our IT want those servers to die.
 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Quickstrike said:

The server is slow to respond, like high latency RAM, it take a long time for it to respond a command like open a file. Like I tried to copyu local files, the progress bar takes a good two seconds to start moving. It's probably a virtualized windows server machine on old metal). Like I said our IT want those servers to die.
 

Yea that seems like a old server issue, not. vm issue. I have many vm fileservers that will easily fill gig on a hdd.

[Jarsky]

As an IT Engineer as a job, this is most definately something we would do. Our job is to enable YOU to do YOUR job. Its not up to us to make decisions on what you do and dont need (within reason). Sometimes some of these things *do* come down to budget. The cost of all that hardware + ongoing support and licensing vs what you already have available can be a big factor. This is where discussions come in to agree on the best solution. 

 

Your IT will probably still want to go with virtualisation over bare metal for all the benefits. if they already have a hypervisor platform (e.g VMware).

It's very rare to need to run bare metal servers these days. The ability to move compute resource for an issue, the ease of setting up machine level backups, snapshots for changes, etc....

 

As far as client control, perhaps your IT already have a solution in place. Wether they redirect user folders as already suggested, or they have some sort of VDI solution like Citrix Desktop. There is no need to re-invent the wheel here. Our BI teams typically use Citrix hosted VDI's to run their applications like Power BI and SAP BO. They can attach their local storage if needed, but predominantly all their output is stored on the SAN (storage network) in their own location, which they can reach from their domain joined laptops anyway. 

[Bigun]

This is a ticking time-bomb.  They need to invest in personnel and should have started years ago.