Migrating everything off site

[mjk]

One thing that everyone has discussed here is moving to various public cloud setups. Has anyone considered a full private cloud setup, such as these https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated-cloud/packs/customised/?

 

I thought that was what we were discussing with Google/Azure/AWS

[localzuk]

I thought that was what we were discussing with Google/Azure/AWS

 

All of those are public clouds - shared infrastructure, shared servers etc...

 

A private cloud is basically a set of hardware dedicated only to you.

[mjk]

All of those are public clouds - shared infrastructure, shared servers etc...

 

A private cloud is basically a set of hardware dedicated only to you.

 

I see. In reality I think there is little distinction if the applications (virtual servers) are secure and isolated which I understand they are. Plus there are scalability benefits to sharing the infrastructure to cope better with peak demands and lower costs at low usage.

[localzuk]

I see. In reality I think there is little distinction if the applications (virtual servers) are secure and isolated which I understand they are. Plus there are scalability benefits to sharing the infrastructure to cope better with peak demands and lower costs at low usage.

 

The difference relates to more than server availability etc... Its more the "knowing where your data is" and data protection side I'm thinking of. Things are really cheap when you stick them on unknown servers in unknown places, but there's a lot more to this than just cost!

 

Also, those lower costs don't appear to be very much lower. Google Compute Engine has a 2 vCPU, 7.5GB machine coming in at between 70 and 100 dollars a month. That's a lot of money for a very small machine.

[Chris_]

One thing that everyone has discussed here is moving to various public cloud setups. Has anyone considered a full private cloud setup, such as these https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated-cloud/packs/customised/?

 

I've looked at these things briefly, and also co-locating our own hardware in a datacentre. After some quick maths, it was still a very expensive solution, again we'd still need to increase the size of our internet connection in to the school and add a decent second line for redundancy.

[edutech4schools]

Our local community college has been 100% fully Google since 2009 and have hundreds of thousands of docs in the cloud. They have 2 lines in from separate companies, only have 4 Windows machines in the entire place, and apparently not looked back. It has saved them a stack of money. So it does work.

[Steve21]

Our local community college has been 100% fully Google since 2009 and have hundreds of thousands of docs in the cloud. They have 2 lines in from separate companies, only have 4 Windows machines in the entire place, and apparently not looked back. It has saved them a stack of money. So it does work.

 

Out of curiosity any idea how they do things like Music programs, video editting, CADCAM, SIMs etc?

 

If they've got a 1to1 scheme and built entire curriculum around Google Apps I'd get that, but still don't see how they'd do a normal schools/college work on just Google? Or you including VDI etc in that?

 

Steve

[zag]

Bandwidth is a not really an issue from what I can tell from my testing. If you are creating terabytes of data each day then I would suspect there is something wrong with your network setup and archival processes.

 

I measured our bandwidth to our file server once when people were talking about scare stories for our SSD backend storage "running out of life cycles". In reality for a 1,000 person school we transfer less than 1 gigabyte a day in files. Sure there are days when someone uploads 20gb of data but its the average that counts really. I know because I already backup our entire Veeam images offsite each day over a BT 100mbit Fiber line with no issues.

 

Servers such as VLE, MIS, Backup, Web, library are all ideal candidates to move into the cloud with little effect on the end user.

 

The real key is keeping the single sign on abilities which hopefully will get easier in the future with Azure AD.

 

Response ping time and server availability are the biggest issues that I have found but this was a number of years ago when the cloud providers were not as advanced as today.

 

I personally love the idea of a redundant image in the cloud, and maybe more to the live servers in the future one by one, just like we did when virtulization came out. Its the next logical evolution to put them in the cloud.

Edited May 18, 2015 by zag

[ForgotMyPassword]

We have more and more heading to offsite - we just replaced our SAN about a year ago and I suspect that's the last time we ever will.

 

It takes a change in mindset and a lot of buy in from the teachers to the T&L benefits (of which there are many!) but the move to GAfE has been transformational and really worked for us and is gathering momentum nicely.

 

Conversely though I was in a school last week that won't entertain the idea of off-siting key services and that approach works for them!

 

Cheers,

James

[dhicks]

I've looked at these things briefly, and also co-locating our own hardware in a datacentre. After some quick maths, it was still a very expensive solution, again we'd still need to increase the size of our internet connection in to the school and add a decent second line for redundancy.

 

I found pretty much the same - the cloud looks good at the moment for holding a live, ready-to-go mirror of our server VMs, and Azure / AWS services look affordable, but actually having a bunch of Windows-network servers running in the cloud the whole time starts to get expensive. Pricing wise, for a 200 megabit connection over a gigabit bearer, complete with ADSL line backup, we're looking at prices of somewhere around £10,000 per year. That is a cost, but it is getting affordable - prices might be different in other parts of the country, of course.

[edutech4schools]

Out of curiosity any idea how they do things like Music programs, video editting, CADCAM, SIMs etc?

 

If they've got a 1to1 scheme and built entire curriculum around Google Apps I'd get that, but still don't see how they'd do a normal schools/college work on just Google? Or you including VDI etc in that?

 

Steve

 

I'll try and find out some more info. I know they are going fully 1-2-1 next month using chromebooks. For video / music I would guess they use chrome apps - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/app/89-creative-tools?hl=en-US&utm_source=chrome-ntp-launcher.

 

The reason they need any Windows machines is to run Sims.

[Chris_]

I found pretty much the same - the cloud looks good at the moment for holding a live, ready-to-go mirror of our server VMs, and Azure / AWS services look affordable, but actually having a bunch of Windows-network servers running in the cloud the whole time starts to get expensive. Pricing wise, for a 200 megabit connection over a gigabit bearer, complete with ADSL line backup, we're looking at prices of somewhere around £10,000 per year. That is a cost, but it is getting affordable - prices might be different in other parts of the country, of course.

 

Although an ADSL probably isn't suitable. A 100Mb leased line would probably be more suitable. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect to be paying 15-20k per year on internet connectivity.

[dhicks]

Although an ADSL probably isn't suitable. A 100Mb leased line would probably be more suitable. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect to be paying 15-20k per year on internet connectivity.

 

The quotes we've had are for 200Mb fibre leased lines with an ADSL line as backup, in case something happens to the fibre connection - a separate line, but provided by the same ISP. I suppose, actually, you could maybe use the ADSL line for some extra download capacity, too.

[zag]

Although an ADSL probably isn't suitable. A 100Mb leased line would probably be more suitable. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect to be paying 15-20k per year on internet connectivity.

 

Leased line costs have dropped hugely in the last 3 years.

 

Our 100mbit renewal quote was 6k, 3 years ago it was 15k!

 

Amazing what competition can do to a market

[localzuk]

I've spent the last couple of days figuring out our next backup solution, and again cloud is coming in outrageously expensive, unless I'm missing something.

 

I've spoken to a few providers and the yearly cost appears to come out around £5000 per year for cloud backup of our servers and data, so over 5 years £25,000.

 

Replacing our existing D2D2D solution with another D2D2D solution comes in at £8800 over 5 years, including electricity to run the thing.

 

Have I missed something?!

[Steve21]

I've spent the last couple of days figuring out our next backup solution, and again cloud is coming in outrageously expensive, unless I'm missing something.

 

I've spoken to a few providers and the yearly cost appears to come out around £5000 per year for cloud backup of our servers and data, so over 5 years £25,000.

 

Replacing our existing D2D2D solution with another D2D2D solution comes in at £8800 over 5 years, including electricity to run the thing.

 

Have I missed something?!

 

nope I wouldn't say so I've been looking at cloud backups recently for our new backup system, and if we want "all" the data done, it works out stupid stupid money. If we only want say SIMs done that's not so silly.

 

Even thinking about getting our own co-located style server to do it to as it works out stupidly cheaper (And as it's only for the full failure not like we need super redundacy etc)

 

Steve

[zag]

I've spent the last couple of days figuring out our next backup solution, and again cloud is coming in outrageously expensive, unless I'm missing something.

 

I've spoken to a few providers and the yearly cost appears to come out around £5000 per year for cloud backup of our servers and data, so over 5 years £25,000.

 

Replacing our existing D2D2D solution with another D2D2D solution comes in at £8800 over 5 years, including electricity to run the thing.

 

Have I missed something?!

 

Yes from your previous posts you seem to indicate you have huge storage requirements which may make the costings rather large.

 

Take a look at my blog post: Managing Total Storage in Schools - Blogs - EduGeek.net

 

I guess the question is, if you halved your storage, does it then make financial sense?

[mjk]

Have I missed something?!

 

GAFE is free storage for schools.

[localzuk]

Yes from your previous posts you seem to indicate you have huge storage requirements which may make the costings rather large.

 

Take a look at my blog post: Managing Total Storage in Schools - Blogs - EduGeek.net

 

I guess the question is, if you halved your storage, does it then make financial sense?

 

Nope, if we halve our storage, we end up paying around £3k per year for cloud backup, coming to £15k per year for cloud, or about £6k for the on-site solution.

 

Your blog is interesting, but then I would point out that

 

a) we already archive files.

b) Media files are integral to the curriculum, treating them as the odd cousin and excluding them from the normal backups is actively setting ourselves up to lose pupil or staff work.

c) All our general use cameras are set to low quality mode already. They only get changed to a better quality mode when its for a big event where the photos may be used for professional printing.

d) Media server - doesn't really make much difference. The data still exists.

e) No chance of restricting file types. That's counter-productive. We're here to provide a network to enable people to work, not throw up walls to stop them.

f) Our data is already de-duplicated, as are our backups.

g) We regularly analyse our storage for un-needed oversized files. For example, we got our music department (who record every child's termly performance on video as their way of showing student progress) to convert their recordings from the original camera files to h264 mp4s, reducing the sizes by 80%.

 

So, nope, still costly.

 

GAFE is free storage for schools.

 

And is NOT a suitable backup solution! Its an un-guaranteed storage solution, provided at the whim of Google who can withdraw it at any moment. No chance I'd upload our disaster recovery data to there.

Edited May 19, 2015 by localzuk

[Steve21]

Yes from your previous posts you seem to indicate you have huge storage requirements which may make the costings rather large.

 

Take a look at my blog post: Managing Total Storage in Schools - Blogs - EduGeek.net

 

I guess the question is, if you halved your storage, does it then make financial sense?

 

Question though, don't you still backup the "media/archive" servers etc? So haven't actually saved any space in terms of backups, only in terms of "expensive" vs "cheap" storage? (Yes compression/jpegs etc but the bulk I mean).

 

Steve

[edutech4schools]

My primary schools pay £60 per year for unlimited backup using Cloud Backup and Cloud Storage Management Solutions. CloudBerry Lab which backs up to any cloud service, we backup to Google Drive which has unlimited space for schools.

[localzuk]

My primary schools pay £60 per year for unlimited backup using Cloud Backup and Cloud Storage Management Solutions. CloudBerry Lab which backs up to any cloud service, we backup to Google Drive which has unlimited space for schools.

 

Backing up to Google is out of the question, to start, we quite frankly do not trust Google with our most important data. Which leaves us with paid for solutions - and the price for space isn't cheap!

[edutech4schools]

They support about 20 companies including Office 365 and Amazon.

[mjk]

And is NOT a suitable backup solution! Its an un-guaranteed storage solution, provided at the whim of Google who can withdraw it at any moment. No chance I'd upload our disaster recovery data to there.

 

Actually the contract says they would have to give you six months to migrate the data before they could terminate the service.

 

 

Backing up to Google is out of the question, to start, we quite frankly do not trust Google with our most important data. Which leaves us with paid for solutions - and the price for space isn't cheap!

 

oh I see, it's a personal problem that you have with large companies. I thought as much.

[localzuk]

They support about 20 companies including Office 365 and Amazon.

 

And both are paid for if we want to ensure SLAs and the like. Azure, for our backup data would be £4200 pa to store our existing amount, Amazon a similar price.

 

Actually the contract says they would have to give you six months to migrate the data before they could terminate the service.

 

6 months isn't a long time, and doesn't exactly allow for us to have long term planning if they can change their mind that quickly.

 

oh I see, it's a personal problem that you have with large companies. I thought as much.

 

No, it is a risk assessment based on putting our most important data in the hands of a company with no legal redress, no duty of care, in a different country... The risk is too high for us.

Edited May 19, 2015 by localzuk