Are we ready for cloud based servers ?

[JamesParker]

Hi All

 

just a quick question,

 

do you think we are ready to use cloud servers in a secondary school ?

 

in a primary i think you would get away with it now, but i think in a secondary it would still be to risky and slow for the file servers at least and if you have to have your file servers on site then why bother having any servers in the cloud !

 

i know we have 365 or google that is great and we could use their storage but is that enough !

 

what you all think ? any secondary school got their servers in the cloud ?

 

James

[Roberto]

My old college has moved its file shares into the cloud, but not necessarily all to servers. My current employer has over 1000 servers in the cloud along with scores of cloud services and we don’t have issues.

 

Two or three things matter here. You need fast, redundant internet connections to site to make this viable, you need to be mindful of bottlenecks and plan around them (e.g. think if alternatives if you still use legacy roaming profiles rather than trying to make those work on this) and you need to think in terms of services rather than servers to get value from a cloud migration.

 

For example, Azure Files may do what you need and is likely to be a better choice vs migrating a file server to the cloud, in the same way that Exchange Online, part of the O365 platform you mentioned, is probably a better idea for most people than running your own exchange servers in Azure.

Edited June 26, 2022 by Roberto

[rogerdnixon]

All of our primaries and some of the secondaries are pretty much entirely cloud based. All that's onsite is DNS/DHCP + normally a little low powered box for Papercut.

 

We don't have "servers" in the cloud - we have services. So all MISs are cloud based and everything else runs off Google Workspace. PCs (we are mainly ChromeOS) are managed by Advanced Desktop Security and where we need to deploy software to PCs, we host the files in a Google Cloud Bucket.

 

I've looked at running Papercut as a cloud VM but its quite expensive - especially the VPN costs. Primaries we run little passively cooled industrial mini PCs ~£220 which draw about 10W and just work - the cloud alternative is a lot more.

 

Our sites use either Virgin Media leased lines or Gigaclear connections. Filtering is all cloud based with Securly.

[Wubbalubbadub]

We have moved a few of our primary schools over to cloud - as and when things have failed. After 4 successful migrations, we now have a good platform and are moving the bulk of our other primary schools over. Our model is:

 

Broadband: @SchoolsBroadband - Leased line, Hosted Firewall and filtering

DNS & DHCP: Asked @SchoolsBroadband to enable these on our router (Downside is no local access to this)

MIS: Arbor

Staff Shares: SharePoint

User Areas: OneDrive

Wireless & Switches: Unifi - We use Cloud Unifi for our controller: Cloud UniFi - Let us host your UniFi Controller (So much easier than the cloud keys)

Endpoint management: Endpoint Manager

Printing: Canon Uniflow (hosted) - no VPN's, can print over the internet

 

The only thing I'm not a fan of in this setup, is not having access to DHCP myself..

 

I don't see why this setup wouldn't replicate over to our secondary schools and providing the bulk migration goes well, I hope to start moving our secondary's next summer.

Edited June 26, 2022 by Wubbalubbadub

[chaplic]

Generally, if your view of moving the the cloud is simply lifting the on prem workloads into the cloud you’re not gaining very much. MJ pretty much nails an opinion of how to do it, if you absolutely need a SMBv3 share then I’d probably have it on prem but hooked up to a cloud backend for capacity/ resilience.

[junz]

All of our primaries and some of the secondaries are pretty much entirely cloud based. All that's onsite is DNS/DHCP + normally a little low powered box for Papercut.

 

We don't have "servers" in the cloud - we have services. So all MISs are cloud based and everything else runs off Google Workspace. PCs (we are mainly ChromeOS) are managed by Advanced Desktop Security and where we need to deploy software to PCs, we host the files in a Google Cloud Bucket.

 

I've looked at running Papercut as a cloud VM but its quite expensive - especially the VPN costs. Primaries we run little passively cooled industrial mini PCs ~£220 which draw about 10W and just work - the cloud alternative is a lot more.

 

Our sites use either Virgin Media leased lines or Gigaclear connections. Filtering is all cloud based with Securly.

 

I assume you use Google Drive to store files and if so do you map Google Drive as a network drive for the PC's and redirect the documents/common folders to Google drive?

[rogerdnixon]

We just use the reg key to auto launch the Google Drive App. Chrome is SSO as using GCPW and all they do it sign in with browser. Most stuff is in Google Shared Drives and the vast majority of stuff is Google Docs/Sheets/Slides now.

 

Never found a reliable way of force things like the document folder to Google Drive - equally - never been an issue - we just tell people to open and save stuff direct from their Google Drive if using legacy apps.

[junz]

We just use the reg key to auto launch the Google Drive App. Chrome is SSO as using GCPW and all they do it sign in with browser. Most stuff is in Google Shared Drives and the vast majority of stuff is Google Docs/Sheets/Slides now.

 

Never found a reliable way of force things like the document folder to Google Drive - equally - never been an issue - we just tell people to open and save stuff direct from their Google Drive if using legacy apps.

 

Thanks for Clarifying. A few other questions as follows:

 

 

• How would you move over files from internal file storage to Google Drive and when files are saved to the Google drive App on a Windows PC, are they cached locally and then uploaded to the drive?
  
• Do you prevent people from saving file locally to the C Drive so they have to save to the Google Drive?
  
• How do you allow staff to access programs like Nova T6, A2C inbox and Emarker which all require a Windows OS?
  
• Do use Google Drive for Macs to store Logic Pro files as well?
  

[rogerdnixon]

We move files from local file servers using the Google Drive app - literally copy and paste to one or more shared Drives and just leave to sync. Not sure if that's what you mean.

"Do you prevent people from saving file locally to the C Drive so they have to save to the Google Drive?" - Education - we give them instructions and show them how to use Drive and how to redirect things like Documents folders if they want to - but most stuff is in Google Docs so not a big thing. You can push a policy that prevents access to local drives - but it also kills the Google Drive App as well - so I don't do that.

How do you allow staff to access programs like Nova T6, A2C inbox and Emarker which all require a Windows OS? So we are talking about Windows here still - although we are mainly ChromeOS - so you could run any of those - although I've only heard of Nova-T and we don't use that and don't have SIMS.

Don't have Macs - but you can run the Drive app on them and it works just fine.

[junz]

We move files from local file servers using the Google Drive app - literally copy and paste to one or more shared Drives and just leave to sync. Not sure if that's what you mean.

"Do you prevent people from saving file locally to the C Drive so they have to save to the Google Drive?" - Education - we give them instructions and show them how to use Drive and how to redirect things like Documents folders if they want to - but most stuff is in Google Docs so not a big thing. You can push a policy that prevents access to local drives - but it also kills the Google Drive App as well - so I don't do that.

How do you allow staff to access programs like Nova T6, A2C inbox and Emarker which all require a Windows OS? So we are talking about Windows here still - although we are mainly ChromeOS - so you could run any of those - although I've only heard of Nova-T and we don't use that and don't have SIMS.

Don't have Macs - but you can run the Drive app on them and it works just fine.

 

A2C is an application needed in order to import Candidate info and to see exam results. I know you have previously made videos on Eric om Remote Desktop and wondered whether you still use Ericom?

Also what do you use for your Sign in System (we use Inventry) and Catering (Biostore) as I think for us these are stopping us from going completely Google based.

[rogerdnixon]

Ericom is dead since we moved away from SIMS - we use Bromcom now.

Display stuff is all Chrome Sign Builder or other apps in kiosk mode.

Biostore - we have one secondary using this piece of junk and they still have a local catering server.

[paulkerton]

in a primary i think you would get away with it now, but i think in a secondary it would still be to risky and slow for the file servers at least and if you have to have your file servers on site then why bother having any servers in the cloud !

This is just moving where your servers sit. In some cases, that makes sense - but for the vast majority of use you want to be moving away from servers and moving to service infrastructure. File servers in the cloud when you've got OneDrive or Google Drive? No thanks.

[rogerdnixon]

We have multiple secondaries where we have ditched or never had local file servers in the first place - everything on Drive - just works and works well. Local file servers are yesterdays approach. Cloud File servers would be nuts given how well Drive works.

[ThatBoringBloke]

Cloud based servers - No.

Cloud based services - Yes.

 

Our last onsite file server is going in the summer.

Shared drives and home folders are now all Google Workspace based. In fact our Windows estate is shrinking massively.

The majority of our students now log on to a Chrome based device far more often than a Windows one.

Windows remains purely for the things that can't (wont) move to the cloud anytime soon such as our photography dept's need to use photoshop, and other 'Administrative' things.

 

If I could, I'd do away with all onsite servers and AD. Moving to something like GCPW for Windows authentication to a limited number of users who actually need to use Windows and Office. For now though a local onsite AD remians, though it is no longer the 'primary' form of authntication.

[supportman]

We have used SharePoint and OneDrive for several years now for file storage with no real issues for all users

 

Also Bromcom for MIS all cloud (A2C integration so no need for that extra app)

 

Evolve for trips which is cloud service

 

Senso cloud for monitoring PC's

 

Replit.com for computer science teaching

 

Papercut is the big one we are waiting for to create a better cloud service

 

Lastly waiting on biostore to bring something cloud based to the table for our cashless tills

[Dos_Box]

Genuine question here for those who have moved away to cloud services, how many on-site servers did you reduce by, and how many do you run now for things you simply have to have in-house?

Does this also affect the type/spec of servers you now keep on site as well?

[slugshead]

I say we manage our own private cloud, it's just your regular hypervisor setup with a SAN

 

As long as it says cloud somewhere, management are happy.

[paulkerton]

Genuine question here for those who have moved away to cloud services, how many on-site servers did you reduce by, and how many do you run now for things you simply have to have in-house?

Does this also affect the type/spec of servers you now keep on site as well?

 

It's difficult to say, because we still have the existing equipment currently, but we're not running as many virtualised server instances anymore.

We still have some legacy stuff in place but print servers, a lot of our file storage is no more and there is a lot less resource wise being used for those things that are still on-site.

[sjpage10]

some good replies here ,

 

though as a secondary school we have a lot of stored data about 1tb of resources including videos for general use for staff and students

 

also staff have 15gb of storage that most use

 

Our internet speed would have to be dam good and reliable, at the moment we quite often bottom it

 

I have to worry as well how we would deal with restoring deleted files, not forgetting log on times that are awful at the moment even with a 10Gb backbone

 

I sort of think if we have to have DCHP,file,EXAM software and SIMS servers what's the point on relying on the cloud for how much a virtual AD, print svr etc. machine takes up

 

we allready have 365 , one drive, cloud backup , IIS as well as direct access

 

 

i sort of think give it 5 more years and all our devices can be thin client , with all our resources in the cloud

 

Though I like the idea of making it someone else’s problem , as that’s all it really achieves as we know the cloud is only someone else’s computer!

Edited June 28, 2022 by sjpage10

[ThatBoringBloke]

Genuine question here for those who have moved away to cloud services, how many on-site servers did you reduce by, and how many do you run now for things you simply have to have in-house?

Does this also affect the type/spec of servers you now keep on site as well?

 

We are down to 4 physical servers.

2 x HyperV hosts

1 x Local backup box

1 x Physical AD DC

Across the two VM's we run a Print (papercut) server, a second DC, a Cashless catering server (Cunninghams) and an 'ICT Server' (WDS, PDQ, MSI's, etc)

 

With the reduced load required on the local servers I am looking at replacing with lower spec'd ones next year.

[sjpage10]

out of interest i have created a poll

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/228445-poll-service-cloud.html

[ThatBoringBloke]

Covid forced a lot of people to move to some cloud services before they were really ready for it, subsequently they are now playing catchup (own opinion) with those who already had a cloud strategy in place.

Whilst changes take time, we've been a Google school since 2013, its only now that we are starting to really see the benefits of moving away from local infractructure to the anywhere, anytime aproach that cloud services offer.