Let me give you a little background of the situation I'm working with and if you have any input / suggestions they would be GREATLY appreciated! 
I have a customer that is a engineering & tool manufacturing plant. They currently run on a NT 4.0 server and have about 75 PC's on the network. A couple weeks ago the motherboard on the NT server got fried and this caused them about 22 hours of downtime which lost them quite a bit of money.
We are trying to come up with a good solution to have a backup route so this won't happen again. The have another server that is just doing exchange & proxy, the box is dual Xeon 2.0 GHz with 2GB of Memory I believe so its resources are hardly being tapped. Our idea was to make this server a backup domain controller that way if the primary server failed this box would pick everything up. The question this left us with was how do we get all the data to the backup server quickly? We had discussed restoring data from tape to the backup server but this would take far to long. Our latest idea was to use a network storage device and have both servers point to it for the data. This way no matter which server is acting as the domain controller they still point to one storage device.
This is the NAS device we are looking at: http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.asp?EDC=316772
If you have any suggestions on the NAS device please let me know. This is not something that I've ever installed / used before and I don't want to get in over my head if you know what I mean!
Thanks a lot,
BS911
I have a customer that is a engineering & tool manufacturing plant. They currently run on a NT 4.0 server and have about 75 PC's on the network. A couple weeks ago the motherboard on the NT server got fried and this caused them about 22 hours of downtime which lost them quite a bit of money.
We are trying to come up with a good solution to have a backup route so this won't happen again. The have another server that is just doing exchange & proxy, the box is dual Xeon 2.0 GHz with 2GB of Memory I believe so its resources are hardly being tapped. Our idea was to make this server a backup domain controller that way if the primary server failed this box would pick everything up. The question this left us with was how do we get all the data to the backup server quickly? We had discussed restoring data from tape to the backup server but this would take far to long. Our latest idea was to use a network storage device and have both servers point to it for the data. This way no matter which server is acting as the domain controller they still point to one storage device.
This is the NAS device we are looking at: http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.asp?EDC=316772
If you have any suggestions on the NAS device please let me know. This is not something that I've ever installed / used before and I don't want to get in over my head if you know what I mean!
Thanks a lot,
BS911
