Backup System For 5 PC SMB
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@BRRABill said:
Say Monday morning hits and they were robbed over the weekend. All 5 employees could be up and running at 9:15.
Somehow I don't think you need that quick of a RTO.. Considering how little you are willing to spend, down time must not cost you that much.
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@BRRABill said:
Say Monday morning hits and they were robbed over the weekend. All 5 employees could be up and running at 9:15.
Using what hardware, though. I get that it is remote, but if someone steals your desktop, you still need a desktop to keep working. Providing loaner Windows licenses isn't valid either
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From what you are describing, it sounds like what you really want is actually VDI. Is there any reason not to actually do VDI? Other than costs. Amazon has a nice VDI product.
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I can see where you are going, but it's not going to be an option. It's layers upon layers of licensing problems. It is a "failover to VDI" project which isn't licensenable. If you wanted to do that concept you could with separate VDI instances and only the data being backed up so that you can failover in that way. No problem there. But the cost would be huge. But because you are not dealing with SA licensing you would need to them license all of the equipment that would access the VDI which would be another nightmare.
It's lots of issues that come together here. A little bit on the technology side and a ton on multiple licensing fronts.
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This seems extreme for a five person office that isn't running a server or other infrastructure. Just a weird mismatch of wanting low downtime but not having an infrastructure to enable it. But going for really high end backup and recovery systems. A lot less money could get you something really good, I think. Obviously lots of companies tackle this every day. It's not that your needs are weird or uncommon.
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Most companies approach this with a combination of local backups, local storage and the ability to replace machines quickly.
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Something that needs to be addressed, I think....
You mentioned a fear of them having their desktops stolen en masse. This can happen, I've seen it happen. If that is the kind of thing that we are working to protect against and the kind of data that we are talking about is seven year retention.... I believe that we just said that we are looking at desktops holding seven years of customer tax data that could reasonable all walk out just on desktops? That seems like a big risk. Is there some special security being considered for just how much and how valuable the data stored on the desktops seems to be?
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I think we've broken away from my original 5 person company question.
I am defending the theory of why image backups with real-time spinup of a VM is a viable backup strategy for a small business.
You asked about computers. Everyone has a computer at home, the library, whatever. It could work until I rebuilt their systems.
To be honest, I'm not sure what direction to go in this thread any more, LOL. Too many smart people on here!
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Even the 1 person company thinks they need to be up 24/7.
They don't. it's ridiculous. But that's how they think.
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@BRRABill said:
Even the 1 person company thinks they need to be up 24/7.
They don't. it's ridiculous. But that's how they think.
Actually especially a one person company. The Fortune 100 don't make those kinds of business mistakes. Only really tiny companies have that kind of hubris.
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@BRRABill said:
I think we've broken away from my original 5 person company question.
Ah. Might be worth a new thread then
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@BRRABill said:
I am defending the theory of why image backups with real-time spinup of a VM is a viable backup strategy for a small business.
Even if you wanted to fail over to VDI, I can do that even more efficiently without an image based backup. I'm not confident that it is as valuable as you are imagining. I see why it sounds good, but all of the resulting features that you have I can achieve without needing to have heavy image backups being shipped over a WAN.
It would be viable, sure. And sometimes it might be ideal, but it doesn't feel like it should be. It's starting from the fundamental concept that the desktops are their own servers. Which even in a one person business, I would not do today.
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@BRRABill said:
You asked about computers. Everyone has a computer at home, the library, whatever. It could work until I rebuilt their systems.
Okay, so you meant going to "bring your own device" as a failover - going to somthing outside of the IT's dominion.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Okay, so you meant going to "bring your own device" as a failover - going to somthing outside of the IT's dominion.
It's how small companies roll for the most part. At least the ones I deal with. Not saying it is right. Just saying it is.
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Let me reverse it. Let's start from your goal and drive with that rather than driving from the solution. The thread is driven by the desire to do all of this using imaging. I can see why that would happen.
But let's say that what you want is the ability to take a backup, retain it for seven years, have it be cost effective and if a desktop dies that you want to be able to restore quickly and/or work from a remote VDI instance via a BYOD method until the desktop is restore. And you want the restore to be quick and painless.
Cool, i can do all of that today without an image-based backup system
So you don't lose any functionality, I don't think, you just can't do it using the technology that you are thinking. -
@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Okay, so you meant going to "bring your own device" as a failover - going to somthing outside of the IT's dominion.
It's how small companies roll for the most part. At least the ones I deal with. Not saying it is right. Just saying it is.
It's critical from a licensing standpoint, though. With the kind of VDI that you were looking at, every device at home that they want to use would need its own license as they don't have enterprise, VL or SA licenses attached to them. Using consumer gear with straight VDI is a problem.
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One of the keys here is, I think....
- Decide that you want to use Microsoft technologies and then work in a solution set that is completely defined by their licensing restrictions or....
- Decide to work without Microsoft products and potentially have the freedom to do basically anything that you want.
More or less it is... you can't have your cake and eat it, too. The choice of Windows is a tradeoff primarily around licensing restrictions. If they feel that MS' products are so awesome that they are the best choice, and most companies do certainly, then they live in a highly curtailed world. They always have the option to avoid that if they wanted.
If you went to the Mac world the choices are far, far fewer. You are stuck with no virtualization options at all, no VDI at all, only one hardware vendor, etc. So MS is actually the more flexible of the two making them middle of the road, overall, for licensing.
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I get where you are coming from, I really do. The idea that you can just take an image and file up somewhere is so simple and obvious. I think if you look at it from MS' perspective it makes sense, mostly, though....
To MS they gave you a discount on the license cost to have it tied to hardware so that you have limited options. If they didn't do this you would get all kinds of flexible use cases out of their software that they need to make money on. VDI is a huge money maker for them so giving it away for free to OEM license holders would make OEM restrictions vanish and FPP licenses pointless and revenues decline. If you could just move the license to another box you would buy a cheaper second desktop without a Windows license on it and move your failed license over there.
Even if you put in restrictions like "system failure" to authorize a license relocation all you are doing is making people either argue over "what constitutes a failure" or induce failures to gain licensing rights. It doesn't work well in practice.
From what you "want" to do with it it all seems very reasonable. The problem isn't what you want to do but what allowing what you want to do would enable others to do.
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I've seen accounting firms go to Linux across the board for just these reasons.
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I wonder how feasible Linux is for the customer in question. What applications are they running? What tools do they use? You can do a lot on Linux these days, small businesses rarely want to go that route because they are used to Windows, already know it, have some well established tools there or whatever, but very often Linux is totally viable.
