Hi all,
I'm keen to hear feedback from schools who have moved their school servers onto 'the cloud' so that they are fully hosted online. My school is thinking about whether we want to go this way - whether it'll save us some money and whether it would slow down our network or have other unforeseen disadvantages. Please get back to me if you have experience of this in a school environment?
Apologies for cross-posting - I'll post this in a couple of places in the hope that I get some replies.
Ta
Rebecca
It's an interesting topic to discuss in general. Hosting email
offsite is a no brainer. I see the obvious limitations coming with
multimedia and the like where a 100Mbps internet link is going to
clog up pretty quickly with traffic when people need to edit their
stuff and the volume of storage needed will end up costing a lot
to host in the cloud.
If you are being captivated by the argument that power supply and
servers are a lot more reliable and dependable when you've moved
them off the site into the hands of specialists working in data
centers that have the redundancy and backup facilities that would
cost too much for an individual school to put in - well, the
school can always employ someone to resource that inhouse so that
you aren't paying callout fees to support contractors. Ultimately
if you believe your operation is so important that it's seriously
going to be disrupted by a half hour power outage - readjust your
horizons I think.
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Heya RebeccaWhenever I work with a school that is looking to explore moving to a 'serverless' environment, I find the best place to start is to define a list of actual services that run on the server. Many smaller schools see their server as a bit of a black-box and don't realise that the individual services that it provides can be split up and provided in different ways. They don't have to all be on that one box, and they don't necessarily all have to be migrated to the same alternative location.For example, if mail service has already been migrated 'to the cloud' (eg Google mail), the school only has a single unauthenticated 'shared folder' (which isn't that uncommon in Primary Schools!), and the SMS and library systems aren't running on the server anyway (eg Edge/eTap, and Access-It running on the library computer itself), then there may not be much need left for replacing and maintaining the server for another iteration. Especially if the school uses workstations that don't use domain credentials to log in (again, common in those with Macs and Chromebooks)It may be that there is better value to be obtained from moving the DHCP service onto the (SNUP-supplied) core switch, and changing the DHCP-assigned DNS servers to use upstream DNS (ie N4L) instead of a local cache, then replacing the server itself with a simple cheap NAS box (if file-sharing is needed at all)The correct answer differs from school to school, and from one school type to another (ie the needs of intermediates and colleges differ significantly to kindergartens and primaries).So I find the best first step to make in determining the correct approach, is to define the list of services the server provides. Then one can get an idea of what the server actually does and take it from there.Just my 2c :)Pete
On 26/10/2016, at 7:49 pm, Rebecca Ronald <r.ronald@maristcollege.school.nz> wrote:Hi all,
I'm keen to hear feedback from schools who have moved their school servers onto 'the cloud' so that they are fully hosted online. My school is thinking about whether we want to go this way - whether it'll save us some money and whether it would slow down our network or have other unforeseen disadvantages. Please get back to me if you have experience of this in a school environment?
Apologies for cross-posting - I'll post this in a couple of places in the hope that I get some replies.
Ta
Rebecca
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Thank you for the replies and info.
We currently have two physical hosts and about 10 virtual servers. All are about to run out of warranty, hence the timing of this query. Our network support providers are suggesting online hosting of most things, and using the remaining free server space for media department files. All the schools that I've heard about with the services hosted in the cloud are primary - so I'm thinking that maybe the online model isn't as suitable for a secondary setting.
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Love to see the breakdown of that. We never paid more than
$10,000 for a server and that was a pretty high spec one. Maybe
your supplier charges 200% markup on hardware.
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What's the attraction of buying an HP server, we had servers
built by Cyclone and other resellers using Intel components,
*very* reliable and high spec.
Your cloud supplier is not quoting $75k for the simple reason they are not spending that much on hardware. They might only be speccing for a $10k hypervisor host that you are sharing with someone else.
If the existing solution is virtualised the migration is as
simple as copying a few VHD files, and as such does not warrant
more than four figures.
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15K one off setup cost would buy a pretty good server, 9k ongoing
costs to rent their building, pay power bills etc.
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I hear tell the Ministry is sponsoring a cloud trial out your
way, be interesting what the school's costs were.
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