Server side you can run something like Dell Dpack for 48hrs.

@Dashrender said:

@Jason said:

@Dashrender said:

Wanna visit Chocolately.org

Choco Lately? It's chocolatey

Thanks, fixed the title.. the post itself was correct

No it wasn't that's why it was the wrong website.

@coliver said:

If you still want to use your domain name and don't want to deal with Email forwarding. Check out Zoho Mail. You can get a personalized domain name and 10 email addresses for free.

I've used it before but their email sucks. I don't really need my firstlast.net anyway I just have it.

@Minion-Queen said:

I love having exchange and HATE gmail now. But I get so much email both personal and work for both businesses that I can't do without the folders etc.

Yeah I wouldn't want to give it up for work I get 300-500 emails per day. I need folder. But Tags seems more powerful for my personal one, and maybe could be for work if it was polished more. I have about 20,000 emails in my gmail account and it's easier to find an email there than my exchange account with much much less email.

@Dashrender said:

Wanna visit Chocolately.org

Choco Lately? It's chocolatey

@Dashrender said:

Anyone have a Windows 7 machine out there without Flash installed? Wanna visit Chocolately.org and see if it wants to install Flash on you?

This seems like the most bizarre thing.

That's not the right website. http://chocolatey.org/

I bought Office 365 small business premium last year for myself personally. Now I get permanent licenses to office pro plus though HUP for $9.99. So I'm thinking of dropping O365. Yes, I will lose exchange email but, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I've decided I don't really like using exchange email outside of work as much as I though.. to be honest outlook sucks, OWA is okay. and Having to use folders sucks, the tags and search in gmail is a million times better and it's free. Exchange just seems to be using too much outdated methods anymore.

@scottalanmiller said:

Put like eight SSDs in RAID 5, have a good memory cache in front of them and you are looking at write lifetimes heading towards a millennium!

I'm tempted to buy one of those 8bay drobo SANs (cause it's the cheapest I can find) and put all consumer SSDs in it. Maybe I can find another SAN cheaper on ebay (for home use of course) with my Dell servers.

@Dashrender said:

If he has 6 TB of used storage today, and we assume that will be mostly static, and we add 12 GB a day - again as static files

Just because the amount of data stays about the same does not mean it's static data, every time a user opens a file and saves it will re-write that whole file to the SSD.

@DustinB3403 said:

@Jason That's the plan, any recommendations on an Auto Loader. I'd really like to use LTO 6 in this write up. @scottalanmiller said LTO 6 isn't released yet though ....

Something like this should work http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/tape-automation/product-detail.html?oid=5336447#!tab=features

@DustinB3403 said:

From the other thread it was discussed that we could use LTO Tapes to create our weekly full backups. Is this the correct item?

Additionally how might I tie this into my plan for backup.

I still need to determine, to what device I'm going to backup our VM's and Data to either a R620 server in RAID 10 on SR with 3 or 4TB drives running a CIFS server for of management with the LTO Tape.

Any recommendations.

Unfortunately I'm outside of my experience with Tapes and how to tie them in.

You might want an autoloader to keep a months worth of tapes in it. which will be networked for control then have SCSI for data. Whatever you do if you are virtualizing make sure it can be passed through, though really the backup server should be a separate physical box.

@gjacobse said:

At some point, when I actually HAVE a server or two.. I plan to build this with some minor alterations:

DIY Server Rack

Looks like the Norco 24U rack from new egg is actually cheaper.

@scottalanmiller said:

That is awesome. Don't forget that Amazon has a free tier too!

With lots of loopholes, they almost always find a way to charge you.

@johnhooks said:

I'm surprised they can open files with multiple users and not have them open as read only.

Office is the main program that will do this. AutoCad is suppose to too but it does not always work. (and if using DFS/Branchcache neither will work well if at all) This stuff is based on using lock files. Not always accurate. We have a program that's in house that runs on top of autocad to manage projects and who's in it as well as handle file naming, defualt text etc. All of it uses a SQL server on the back to manage it.

@JaredBusch said:

Old hardware? How much electricity that going to cost you. Think about it. Power up an old server and just feel the heat coming off of it. So not only do you have the power for the system and monitor, you also have the power to your HVAC in the house running more. The costs are real. The math is fairly simple to work out.

Solution? Only run servers in winter then turn down Central Heat source jk.

@Dashrender said:

Either 2 TB 7200 SAS drives in RAID 10 or 1 TB SSD drives in RAID 5 (8 TB per previous discussion, currently using 6 TB)

Have you calculated your data growth rate? that only leaves room for 1.33% growth.

@Dashrender said:

Considerations:
8 port 10 GigE switch with 10GigE in each server. Could probably be done with bonded 1 GigE ports instead, minimum of two per server.

What kind of data are you pushing over this next work to need 10Gig? We don't even use 10Gig on our production network, we only have it for the iSCSI networks and some uplinks from the datacenter. All server connections are 1gig to the production network.

@DustinB3403 said:

The primary file server is directly connected to the Buffalo drive. The server simply shares out the attached stored.

The primary DC has multiple functions on it, Spiceworks, AD, and 2 network shares.

The 3rd server is acting as a HyperV host for 0365 / AD integration and a Reporting server.

That's an odd way to do it. I'd take the Spiceworks off the DC for sure and put in on the server with the o365 Azure sync. File server is better separate from a DC too.

@Dashrender said:

Is there such a thing as zero data loss potential?

Next to it when you have change monitoring, not just scheduled backups.

@DustinB3403 said:

The primary file ....... The server simply shares out the attached stored.

That's the case with any file server.