Infrastructure Done Right: Part II

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• November 2007 Issue
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Most tax and accounting firms and other businesses I visit have mechanical issues that need attention and correction. Your firm, regardless of its size, is probably no exception. Qualified internal IT personnel as well as outsourced vendors frequently make incorrect recommendations based on their level of knowledge or perception that the firm won’t spend the money to do things right. This year is an excellent time to prepare your network infrastructure for the future while giving you more flexibility and reliability in day-to-day operations. When your infrastructure is right, you also have greater productivity, team member satisfaction and easier disaster recovery.

My hope is that you can use the two-part checklist I’ve provided in last month’s column and this one to see how your technology infrastructure measures up to current and reasonable standards. If you are a smaller business, you will still need most everything listed in the two lists. The items underlined are specifically for businesses of 50 or more people, but you will notice that very few items are underlined. Additionally, my team maintains a list of specific part number recommendations at www.nmgi.com. Look for technology recommendations on our site.

For more info ...

Look for Part I of this column in the October 2007 issue (also at www.CPATechAdvisor.com/go/1759) where Randy started his checklist that included the following areas:

• Protection (surge protection, UPS, backup, continuous data protection & generators)
• Network (high-speed communication lines, load balancing firewall, SSL-VPN capability, commercial grade power over Ethernet, segmenting, Virtual LAN switch, certified CAT 6a cable & wireless access points)

Since many of you are now doing your final upgrades of the year, I have tried to prepare a simple list of key technologies. Last month’s column specifically built from the outside communications towards servers. This column works towards workstations. Here are our best suggestions for the properly dressed infrastructure:

SERVERS

• Blade or Rack Servers
  Businesses of any size at all should be using rack mount servers for more reliability and the ability to repair more quickly instead of tower server configurations. However, there is a new generation of server technologies that has been introduced by IBM, HP and Sun called blade servers. The enclosures accommodate many physical CPUs, drives and network cards in a single cabinet. Small businesses can now justify owning blade servers, and will find performance,
  reliability and cost justifications for using this approach.
• Storage
  • DASD RAID V — Direct Attached Storage Disks (DASD) are still very popular, and the minimum configuration we like to recommend includes a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) controller with ample onboard
    cache. RAID requires a minimum of three disks to play, and we actually prefer an additional hot spare drive in the array at all times, as well. The only time we recommend a mirrored pair of drives in a server is when the server is attached to a SAN (storage area network) or the server has a special purpose like terminal services with no significant data stored locally.
  • SAN — Storage Area Networks are very common in large businesses. The cost has continued to drop enough that smaller and smaller businesses can afford the technology. Expect SANs to arrive in blade enclosures to make them even more affordable for smaller businesses. Additionally, new technologies like iSCSI and IP SANs are reducing costs over traditional Fiber Channel technologies.
  • NAS — Network Attached Storage is an inexpensive way to share a fairly large capacity of disk. Many of these units are slower and should only be used for backup or intermittently used files, not for day-to-day operations.
• Virtualization
  Your IT team should be looking at converting your physical servers to virtual servers. This technology is working excellently to reduce costs, improve reliability and speed up server deployments. We expect even the smallest businesses to use virtualized servers over the next few years. Virtualization for both servers and desktops is such an important topic that I will cover it in more detail in a future column.