Azure is there a place for it in school?

[Dave_O]

I have been looking at cloud services and thought I'd do some rough costings to see how Azure matches up both for backing up and for server workloads

 

Present backup solution

 

1 x ESXi free server with VM (Windows 2012 R2 & Veeam) (18Tb) location A, 1 x NAS box (18Tb) location B, 1 x ESXi free server with VM (Windows 2012R2 & DPM) (12Tb) location C. By location I mean physically seperate buildings. Total cost including all warranties, licensing for Veeam (5 years) & Windows all new kit £10,000 over lets say 5 years thats £2,000 pa. For that I can realistically back up 12Tb of data (no transaction, egress or ingress costs) in 3 seperate locations on a weekly basis. Granted if we had a direct hit from a nuke then that would be game over but we are using SQLtoFTP to a Google drive account for MIS and financials also quite a lot of staff and students are putting stuff on O365 or Google Drive so if anyone actually survived or gave a damn after armageddon then not absolutely catastrophic (all relative of course)

 

Azure equivalent

 

So we would need 12Tb of storage with a weekly data transfer of say 2Tb Using Block Blobs, LRS on Cool (love the lingo!) that works out at about £80 per month ie £960pa.

 

Which is cheaper until you realise that you still need a DPM & Veeam server on site to push the stuff up there!

 

Probably not an alternative but interesting as an adjunct to an existing solution. OK back to the drawing board. So what if you start putting server (compute) instances/load up there. First off lets look at things you realistically couldn't put up there.

 

1. A DC - got have some AD on site to process the group policies otherwise logins would be unacceptably slow

2. SCCM - can't really PXE and download a wim over the wire

3. Print server - not sure that the MFDs and printers could cope with a remote print server

4. MIS - SIMS (possibly moving out there in the future)

 

Not a huge amount needed on site, however you would need some iron to run this stuff on. Lets say with licensing, warranties 2 x ESX (HyperV) servers, storage (which would be local because by then they could run the virtual san on 2 nodes not a min of 3) total cost £12,000 over 5 years giving £2400 pa. Hang on you'd need that whether you embrace the cloud or not!! If you are prepared to risk it you could run all of that workload on one node with a total cost of £6000 over 5 years or £1200 pa

 

OK. So what about the cost of the rest of the servers running in Azure. Lets say you manage to put your other 6? servers out there and one SQL (standard) total cost about £400 pm ie £4800 pa.

 

Now bear in mind you're already spending £2400 pa to support your on site servers. What's the incentive to spend another £24,000 over 5 years to run the Azure workload? Why not just run it on site on the kit you've already had to buy to run the stuff you have to run on site (confused)!

 

As for switch/wireless infrastructure savings, well there aren't any as you still have to make the devices (what ever they may be) connect to the interweb in some way. Unless, of course, you're going to get everyone to use their own 3/4/5 G connection.

 

I'll not bother going into internet costs

 

Given the size of most schools (mine has 1750 students with around 1000 devices of one sort or another) I don't think a whole sale push to the cloud on the server side is on the cards in the short term but putting things out there one at a time might be worth considering.

 

I have just purchased 4 quatloos of Azure credits and am experimenting with Veeam backups to blob storage & DPM on line backups as well as running a SQL server instance (not sure what for yet) just to see what the money drainage per month is like.

 

I've even gone and bought a book on Azure "Mastering Microsoft Azure .... something or other" and had a play using the free credits. If you familiar with VMware or HyperV then it's not rocket science, you just need to get your head around the terminology and the topology.

 

Personally I can't see all on-site backend services disappearing within the next 5 years, (beyond that it's not my problem - retiring), what I do see is more and more server loads going out there over time. To be honest the specialist software so prevelant 5 years ago, is dying a death as is the need to support it. I see very few staff using anything other than office (MS and Google) productivity tools any more.

 

What am I saying?

 

1. You will still need to invest in back end kit despite what the MS licensing guy says

2. Learn how to use Azure, AWS or some other cloudy provider

3. Think carefully before changing your backup habits

[FragglePete]

Did you put yourself forward for the Microsoft Blueprint Whitepaper meeting and have you been selected? Your the sort of person they would need to discuss their blue sky thinking they have at the moment with everything in their cloud.

 

Pete

[Dave_O]

Pete

 

I did but have heard nothing back yet. Not sure they'd be interested in listening to a sad old man like me.

[TechMonkey]

I'm starting to feel that Azure and AWS is a bit like outsourcing. It has its places and is good for specific projects but for running a whole system becomes restrictive.

 

I'm just thinking at them moment we have about 22 servers as if we need a server we just fire a new one up. We are in the fortunate situation to be on Datacenter licenses so there is no cost, plenty of capacity on our virtual infrastructure so no hardware costs. Want to trial something? Fire up a new server. Don't like it, delete it. We can effectively do what we want, when we want it. Shift this to the cloud and, as long as my thinking is correct, anytime we wanted to fire up a server we would have to budget for it. Not sure how Windows Server licensing works on Azure but I would guess you can't get Datacenter style licensing.

 

So for a specific service, a highly available website or a system that has to survive any on site disaster, then I can see it being great. For our day to day system I could see it being almost like a throwback to 5-10 years ago.

[Dave_O]

I'm starting to feel that Azure and AWS is a bit like outsourcing. It has its places and is good for specific projects but for running a whole system becomes restrictive.

 

I'm just thinking at them moment we have about 22 servers as if we need a server we just fire a new one up. We are in the fortunate situation to be on Datacenter licenses so there is no cost, plenty of capacity on our virtual infrastructure so no hardware costs. Want to trial something? Fire up a new server. Don't like it, delete it. We can effectively do what we want, when we want it. Shift this to the cloud and, as long as my thinking is correct, anytime we wanted to fire up a server we would have to budget for it. Not sure how Windows Server licensing works on Azure but I would guess you can't get Datacenter style licensing.

 

So for a specific service, a highly available website or a system that has to survive any on site disaster, then I can see it being great. For our day to day system I could see it being almost like a throwback to 5-10 years ago.

 

Nail on the head. This is why many schools who were in a managed service are now coming out. As you say flexibility.

[CyberNerd]

I'm just thinking at them moment we have about 22 servers as if we need a server we just fire a new one up. We are in the fortunate situation to be on Datacenter licenses so there is no cost, plenty of capacity on our virtual infrastructure so no hardware costs. Want to trial something? Fire up a new server. Don't like it, delete it. We can effectively do what we want, when we want it. Shift this to the cloud and, as long as my thinking is correct, anytime we wanted to fire up a server we would have to budget for it. Not sure how Windows Server licensing works on Azure but I would guess you can't get Datacenter style licensing.

 

So for a specific service, a highly available website or a system that has to survive any on site disaster, then I can see it being great. For our day to day system I could see it being almost like a throwback to 5-10 years ago.

 

Rather than fire up a new server for each application, fire up a new container for each app. As the app is used then more containers are created automatically and you pay for what you use. I would bet that your 22 servers are being used like 1% of the time and much of that just running the O/S - not a great use of resources.

The problem is that schools still run big, monolithic applications but the rest of the IT world is moving on from this. MS (successfully) moved apps from DOS to .NET and the new apps will be container based. Look at how Google,Amazon,ebay work. For the current set of old style apps we are still a bit stuck - but MS can only push developers by saying how many customers are using their new platforms.

 

Google Compute Engine uses DataCentre licenses, presumably Azure does too.

[TechMonkey]

Rather than fire up a new server for each application, fire up a new container for each app. As the app is used then more containers are created automatically and you pay for what you use. I would bet that your 22 servers are being used like 1% of the time and much of that just running the O/S - not a great use of resources.

The problem is that schools still run big, monolithic applications but the rest of the IT world is moving on from this. MS (successfully) moved apps from DOS to .NET and the new apps will be container based. Look at how Google,Amazon,ebay work. For the current set of old style apps we are still a bit stuck - but MS can only push developers by saying how many customers are using their new platforms.

 

Google Compute Engine uses DataCentre licenses, presumably Azure does too.

 

Thanks for that explanation. I did assume it was a knowledge/understanding failing and you are right, some of our servers are barely doing anything although that isn't an issue as they are on minimum specs and sharing resources.

 

My worry is that Education suppliers seem to lag behind even Banking suppliers for holding on to old tech. How many publishers are still pumping out Flash and Quicktime dependent resources? IT will need to go back to be the bad department who say no all the time as we tell staff no you can't use that compatible with Windows 95 bit of software or you need to up date your lesson plans (ha ha ha ha) as that piece of software we have been using for 15 years won't work any more.

 

I'm sure the likes of Docker and containerizing could be useful in Education but I don't think we are in a position to bring them to play. Getting there though.

[Dave_O]

Rather than fire up a new server for each application, fire up a new container for each app. As the app is used then more containers are created automatically and you pay for what you use. I would bet that your 22 servers are being used like 1% of the time and much of that just running the O/S - not a great use of resources.

The problem is that schools still run big, monolithic applications but the rest of the IT world is moving on from this. MS (successfully) moved apps from DOS to .NET and the new apps will be container based. Look at how Google,Amazon,ebay work. For the current set of old style apps we are still a bit stuck - but MS can only push developers by saying how many customers are using their new platforms.

 

Google Compute Engine uses DataCentre licenses, presumably Azure does too.

 

Let's say we get rid of all these legacy app and run container based solutions IaaS or PaaS, what type of app/compute/webservice exactly would a school put on Azure?

[CyberNerd]

Let's say we get rid of all these legacy app and run container based solutions IaaS or PaaS, what type of app/compute/webservice exactly would a school put on Azure?

 

I thinks MS's strongest message is to get rid of Office, Exchange and Sharepoint locally right now.

Education providers are terrible at getting their technology uptodate. Too many amateur programmers in edu.

At the same time I don't think us NM's have exactly been at the forefront of tech (I recall everyone on edugeek shouting about how providers don't provide MSI's, at the same time I was saying a webapp is MUCH easier to deploy). in short, I don't see why you can't put everything in Azure if you wanted and just give users an internet connection - it works extremely well for Google.

[ColinP]

I don't quite understand how the file system side would work on a cloud environment with shared end user devices? you cant have the onedrive sync tool downloading a users documents to every machine they use?

how do you over come all the lag that would be generated? what is the point of gigabit switches when my line is only 100mb? how about all the video content....

 

im not anti cloud or anything but I need to see why it would be better than what we have? eg I moved from exchange to Office 365 because we had a real world benefit, I cant see this with Azure

[Dave_O]

I don't quite understand how the file system side would work on a cloud environment with shared end user devices? you cant have the onedrive sync tool downloading a users documents to every machine they use?

how do you over come all the lag that would be generated? what is the point of gigabit switches when my line is only 100mb? how about all the video content....

 

im not anti cloud or anything but I need to see why it would be better than what we have? eg I moved from exchange to Office 365 because we had a real world benefit, I cant see this with Azure

 

Firstly staff, students and techs need to get away from the concept of having to have locally stored files and the whole sync thing. Fine to have a small area to save things in the short term but more generally keep things out there. As for video, the O365 video is very good at transcoding them and even large videos stream well over 100mb.

[ColinP]

We dont have to have locally stored files etc. I know cloud works, im just not convinced its better

[ozydave]

You do have to have some locally stored files. Video editing. Staff and students seem to do a lot of it here.

[CyberNerd]

You do have to have some locally stored files. Video editing. Staff and students seem to do a lot of it here.

 

yeah. this was a year ago:

Conclusion - A Guide To Professional Video Editing Software

MS are not looking backwards, neither should you.