Okay, so the owner of the company I work for is pretty hesitant to drop money, as most are. Currently, the company has about 25 employees - 15 or so in the main office, then 5 in each of the branch offices. There is a VPN connection to each of the outer branches. The company has one main application that they pretty much rely on - any downtime at all is pretty much a disaster.
Before I got here, they had 4 servers. The most powerful one was used as a primary domain controller running Windows (Server) 2000 - it also runs Exchange and has a DLT drive which is the primary means of backup around here. The other 3 were used for the application - one as the app server (2nd most powerful here), one to host the production database, and the last to host a demo database (the last 2 servers are basically identical, except there's a DDS tape drive in the production database server).
Since I've been here, they've added a basic webserver and, more recently, a new app server to host the newest version of the application they rely on. The new version no longer requires 3 servers - so they are now free to be used elsewhere.
Our original plan was to turn them all into secondary domain controllers and file servers - one in each branch office.
However, our contact at the software company who writes the application suggested having a backup server in place for the application server, which I fully agree with. However, I don't want to give up having secondary domain controllers in each office - I think that's pretty important. So we're possibly looking at getting another server to either backup the DC in the main office or to backup the app server, whichever makes the most sense.
Doing some browsing through forums and what not, though - I am pretty new to all this, after all - I'm seeing that we probably shouldn't be running Exchange on the primary DC - that it should, in fact, have its own server. Is this pretty much the popular opinion?
To complicate things further, there is a possibility that, if a certain account takes off like we expect it to, we may be adding up to 6 new offices around the country within the next 2 years(!). So, obviously, I want to be ready for that.
So, I guess I'm looking for expert (or at least educated) opinions on what all needs to be done with this network over the next couple years. I want to lay out a plan and work out a budget with the owner to get this thing where it needs to be, because I definitely feel like they've been lucky not have an outage in the last 3 years or so (when they've really started growing more rapidly).
If you have questions or need more information, I'll do my best to supply it - I've been somewhat vague, I know, but I don't want to give out any more information about the actual company than I have to, obviously.
Thanks so much in advance...
Before I got here, they had 4 servers. The most powerful one was used as a primary domain controller running Windows (Server) 2000 - it also runs Exchange and has a DLT drive which is the primary means of backup around here. The other 3 were used for the application - one as the app server (2nd most powerful here), one to host the production database, and the last to host a demo database (the last 2 servers are basically identical, except there's a DDS tape drive in the production database server).
Since I've been here, they've added a basic webserver and, more recently, a new app server to host the newest version of the application they rely on. The new version no longer requires 3 servers - so they are now free to be used elsewhere.
Our original plan was to turn them all into secondary domain controllers and file servers - one in each branch office.
However, our contact at the software company who writes the application suggested having a backup server in place for the application server, which I fully agree with. However, I don't want to give up having secondary domain controllers in each office - I think that's pretty important. So we're possibly looking at getting another server to either backup the DC in the main office or to backup the app server, whichever makes the most sense.
Doing some browsing through forums and what not, though - I am pretty new to all this, after all - I'm seeing that we probably shouldn't be running Exchange on the primary DC - that it should, in fact, have its own server. Is this pretty much the popular opinion?
To complicate things further, there is a possibility that, if a certain account takes off like we expect it to, we may be adding up to 6 new offices around the country within the next 2 years(!). So, obviously, I want to be ready for that.
So, I guess I'm looking for expert (or at least educated) opinions on what all needs to be done with this network over the next couple years. I want to lay out a plan and work out a budget with the owner to get this thing where it needs to be, because I definitely feel like they've been lucky not have an outage in the last 3 years or so (when they've really started growing more rapidly).
If you have questions or need more information, I'll do my best to supply it - I've been somewhat vague, I know, but I don't want to give out any more information about the actual company than I have to, obviously.
Thanks so much in advance...
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