File servers - split staff from students?

[jamin100]

I've just finished moving my students home directories from an old 2003 storage server to a 2012r2 VM

 

Now to start on the staff and shared areas

Do I put them all on the same server or on a new machine

 

The setup is a bit flat though. The 2012r2 file server is running on a 3 node hyper-v failover cluster stored on a SAN

The server has a 2TB virtual drive attached to it for storage.

 

Do I create a new file server following the same principle or just put them all on the existing file server?

 

2TB is ample and were probably only using around 1TB at the moment anyway

[Steve21]

Personally I'd split them, it's what we're doing as we move everything to new SAN when we got it Better security just incase someone makes a silly change on share/file permissions, also better in terms of any maintenance/crashing etc won't take both out. All for a small (say what 40GB fully-patched) usage on storage.

 

Steve

[kmount]

It's also worth considering if you're using some of the file services tools on Windows (dedupe, fsrm & AV etc) you may end up chewing through some CPU to get those going so if you're virtualising the file server(s) you are likely better (assuming licensing is sane) with a pair of smaller servers than one big server from a CPU scheduling perspective.

[DavePa]

I'd split them from both a management and security point of view. I'd then explicitly deny access to the staff server from members of the student OU - you don't want them playing with UNC and IP paths and finding even read-only shares on the staff server! Also, as mentioned above, losing one doesn't necessarily mean losing the other if they are separated.