Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

DATALINE AG has recently acquired parts of another company, including office rooms in Lyss, including about 5-10 employees.

The DATALINE IT infrastructure was never designed with multiple sites in mind. However, it’s easy to migrate this, if you’re willing to dig through some docs, and had your GPOs sorted neatly from the beginning. You will need to assign some Site-based GPO’s, for WSUS Servers and similar local caches likes proxies, switch your file sharing infrastructure to DFS, make sure that replication works (still easy with just two sites), etc.

While it is easily possible for a remote branch to use our central Exchange server, thanks to Outlook’s Cached Exchange mode, this is not the case with file shares. Luckily, Microsoft has an excellent technology available to deal with this problem, called DFS. DFS can both provide replication for identical file shares, hosted in multiple sites, and also allow clients to automatically choose the closest server.

All this works using Active Directory sites. There’s also the need for some non-DFS replicated shares, containing for example heavy multimedia content.

For connection, a business ADSL connection, for example from Init7 is more than enough, because user’s don’t have to access file shares in the remote location. I’ve made several good experiences with OpenVPN for site-to-site VPN setups. A machine running Linux just offers so much more flexibility as a router for a small price – at least compared to gear from Cisco or Juniper. Using SOHO equipment like ZyXEL ZyWALLs will usually lead you to a wall, since these products often don’t have the flexibility that might be needed.

But what about infrastructure at the remote location? Yes, this is where we leave the purely technical side, and also get to deal with budget problems. Using IBM’s Standalone Solutions Configuration Tool, i’ve calculated what the minimum acceptable configuration that would be needed.

Yes, that’s about 40’000 CHF list price. I’ve tried to save as much as i can, but for a proper infrastructure, the prices can’t get any lower. I’ve tried to get comparable quotes using Dell’s Online Configurator, but didn’t come out much cheaper.

Getting money for this infrastructure is going to be a lot of work, but that’s also part of my job.

Without money, it is impossible to build a setup which is designed to last. And good equipment is expensive. You can save on a tape library, replacing it with a tape drive. But then you get the situation that backup reliability drops since administrative personnel never really cared about proper IT infrastructure. You can buy cheaper servers without remote console capability, risking long outages. You can save on redundancy, and remove the second PSU, further enhancing the risks for outages.