Topic: Cloud vs Dedicated Servers

[BlackBox]

In the past, I've always worked for companies that use dedicated serves within the office, and have full-time IT staff to maintain them.

I now work for a much smaller company, that is in the process of evaluating a much needed server upgrade, and while I still have many reservations about migrating to the cloud (i.e., security, client owned data, etc.) my new position requires that I take a step back and evaluate all possibilities and factor in the cost-aspect.

I've never used a cloud-based environment, and am not a fan of the prospect of loosing all connectivity in the event that our LAN connection is disrupted, but am open to the idea nonetheless.

Do any of you use cloud servers to store your CAD data, or had to weigh these same considerations already? What did you decide to do, and why?

Cheers

[dgorsman]

We don't use the cloud, but I'm also keeping an eye on it as our various business units and clients expand both in number and geographically.  If it does come to pass, it will be more for collaborating/sharing files with clients for now.  In the future I would expect it to allow the company to better use employee specialties without having to physically relocate them e.g. Civil3D grading specialist from the West coast, mechanical engineering from back East, and on-site surveying from here.

For what its worth, we have file servers, license servers, etc. in remote locations so connection worries aren't much different than using cloud services.

[cadtag]

Probably one of the more serious considerations is client expectations of confidentiality and security.  Anything posted to a cloud service, be it Azure, Dropbox, Google Drive, 360, or what have you, is not, and cannot be considered, confidential.  Remote files are, on all of those service, stored in the clear, unencrypted, and available to anyone who has access, whether a bad actor in the datacenter, or a former employee who still remembers how to get in, or through an error on one of your partners part.  In _theory_ - security at a large datacenter would be better than that at a small shop, but at the same time, the larger target much more attractive target.

As a design firm creating contract drawings and legal documents, the 'not my problem' seen in EULAs will not protect the firm if harm comes to a client due to cloud fubars or Target-style data breaches.  PEs cannot ethically disclaim responsibility, their license mandates adherence to a published code of ethics.

Beyond that, there's the chance (probability = unity) that access to the remote servers will be interrupted at some point for some period.  Anything from hurricanes, to a drunk backhoe operator tearing out the fiber optic lines.  How long can your employer stay in business with no access to his design data?

The rest, you probably have a good handle on all the other negatives --  and can look at possible advantages in your situation.  Servers for small operations are not exactly expensive though -- no real need for anything massive

(1)  AFAIK -- the only 'cloud' provider that takes confidentiality at all seriously is SpiderOak.  Data is encrypted before transmitting to their service, and stored encrypted.  You lose your password, you lose access to those files and can't get them back.  Short of NSA intervention....

[BlackBox]

We don't use the cloud, but I'm also keeping an eye on it as our various business units and clients expand both in number and geographically.  If it does come to pass, it will be more for collaborating/sharing files with clients for now.  In the future I would expect it to allow the company to better use employee specialties without having to physically relocate them e.g. Civil3D grading specialist from the West coast, mechanical engineering from back East, and on-site surveying from here.

For what its worth, we have file servers, license servers, etc. in remote locations so connection worries aren't much different than using cloud services.

Thanks for sharing, dgorsman.

We only have one office, and everything is centrally located now, housing both servers in the same building in which we work daily. Backups are currently to 2TB external drives.

The main appeal in my current situation, has everything to do with the maintenance & support services that come with cloud-based implementation, frankly.

I'm burning the candle at both ends just doing the CAD production I was brought on to do, in addition to interviewing new printer lease firms (two this week), hardware & software upgrades, making old & working computers 'library' machines for us to remote into on and off-site, and researching alternative for a $30K server proposal now (which seems incredibly expensive given my complete lack of experience here).

I'm no sys admin, and have little time to become one, although this situation has caused me to become interested to learn a great deal more.



If the tea leaves are any indicator, my role here will be evolving such that I oversee these sort of topics more and more (the owner is thrilled with how much I've been able to take of of his plate)... Perhaps when things slow down in the next month or so (I hope; most likely after I've helped bring this upgrade to fruition), I'll start looking into obtaining some MS Certifications, etc. as well.

Cheers

[BlackBox]

Probably one of the more serious considerations is client expectations of confidentiality and security.  Anything posted to a cloud service, be it Azure, Dropbox, Google Drive, 360, or what have you, is not, and cannot be considered, confidential.  Remote files are, on all of those service, stored in the clear, unencrypted, and available to anyone who has access, whether a bad actor in the datacenter, or a former employee who still remembers how to get in, or through an error on one of your partners part.  In _theory_ - security at a large datacenter would be better than that at a small shop, but at the same time, the larger target much more attractive target.

Thanks for your comments, cadtag.

For clarity, I do not mean anything public such as Dropbox, Google Drive, etc... I am only interested in private SSD cloud services (i.e., encrypted, scaleable, maintenance services, etc.).

As a design firm creating contract drawings and legal documents, the 'not my problem' seen in EULAs will not protect the firm if harm comes to a client due to cloud fubars or Target-style data breaches.  PEs cannot ethically disclaim responsibility, their license mandates adherence to a published code of ethics.

Beyond that, there's the chance (probability = unity) that access to the remote servers will be interrupted at some point for some period.  Anything from hurricanes, to a drunk backhoe operator tearing out the fiber optic lines.  How long can your employer stay in business with no access to his design data?

The rest, you probably have a good handle on all the other negatives --  and can look at possible advantages in your situation.  Servers for small operations are not exactly expensive though -- no real need for anything massive

(1)  AFAIK -- the only 'cloud' provider that takes confidentiality at all seriously is SpiderOak.  Data is encrypted before transmitting to their service, and stored encrypted.  You lose your password, you lose access to those files and can't get them back.  Short of NSA intervention....

I certainly do not know all of what needs to be considered yet, that's why I am reaching out to others. I just feel that the $30K+ price tag on the proposal we have now from our existing 3rd party IT firm is astronomical, and that there's got to be a superior alternative. The cost-savings for a cloud server is appealing, presuming no deal-breaker issues, but I'm still trying to fully wrap my brain around a topic I've historically discarded for various reasons due to my former work environments.

Only after I understand cloud server scenario better, can I even begin to understand a hybrid approach, but with what little I do grasp now the hybrid approach sounds to be the most secure (dedicated server here, backup to cloud, etc.), but seems as though it may be the most expensive option yet.

Lots of learning to do, and nowhere near enough time to do it to my satisfaction. 

[Bethrine]

Speaking from ignorance: I wonder if that price tag is what they charge due to setting up for cloud systems? 

[BlackBox]

Speaking from ignorance: I wonder if that price tag is what they charge due to setting up for cloud systems? 

The cost I mention is for new hardware, migration from old servers, and implementation of new Hyper-V, exchange, host, CALs, etc.

I've reached out to Dell and have them preparing a quote, which so far, is +/- 60% of the proposal price for hardware alone (which is the cheapest part of the entire spiel anyway), and includes additional items (i.e., new switches, etc.). They're (Dell is) working out the logistics of having a sub-contractor come to the office to 'plug-in' the new hardware, at which point the remote team would gain access and finalize the implementation to decrease the installation costs.


In any event, when all of this is said and done, I wonder if my brain will figuratively have stretch marks? 

My brain, not a normal, smart person's brain (like you guys); I'm not that smart to begin with, so I'm kind of concerned about everything I still need to learn over the next couple of weeks. 

[cadtag]

when you get a good handle on what you want, plz post a summary of your findings.  Heck, might be a good idea for a blog article on your website!

[BlackBox]

when you get a good handle on what you want, plz post a summary of your findings.

Will do. 

Heck, might be a good idea for a blog article on your website!

Oh yeah - I have a website!?! 

Not that I was 'good at it' before my newest employment opportunity, but certainly since, I've been terrible about taking content, tips, etc. that I post and consolidating it on my site. I do check the email daily though.

I haven't even updated one of my apps as being the "Most Downloaded Paid App in December"... Heck, even that post is out of date at this point  ; 15 countries is now 16 (thank you Norway!).

[cadtag]

Here's a relatively cad-specific consideration,  and it presumes that the company currently has a relative typical setup for project files, with all drawing stored in a common location, organized by project, with xref drawings,pdf/dgn/dwf underlays saved with common access underneath the project folders.

Since none of the cloud services area, AFAIK, 'xref aware', all of that data would need to be synched between the remote host and the local workstations.  That's apt to be quite a bit of information.  Good thing multi-terabyte drives are getting cheap.

Xref pathing would be maybe consistent, depending if the synch folder can be relocated in a consistent spot, rather than hardwired to a user-specific path.  Dropbox for example, defaults to c:\users\loginname\dropbox for the synch folder, so my absolute path to xrefs would be different than anyone elses.  IIRC 360 is even less configurableas far as local folder...

There's also lag time on the synch.  refreshing an updated 259Mb file to dropbox takes a fair amount of time on my home system, so depending on the connection speed to/from remote servers: If user A 10' one cube over updates a file user B is xreffing in, there will be a lag while A synches changes up to host, and host synchs changes down to B.  20 minutes?  vs 10 seconds on a local server.

[BlackBox]

Here's a relatively cad-specific consideration,  and it presumes that the company currently has a relative typical setup for project files, with all drawing stored in a common location, organized by project, with xref drawings,pdf/dgn/dwf underlays saved with common access underneath the project folders.

Since none of the cloud services area, AFAIK, 'xref aware', all of that data would need to be synched between the remote host and the local workstations.  That's apt to be quite a bit of information.  Good thing multi-terabyte drives are getting cheap.

Xref pathing would be maybe consistent, depending if the synch folder can be relocated in a consistent spot, rather than hardwired to a user-specific path.  Dropbox for example, defaults to c:\users\loginname\dropbox for the synch folder, so my absolute path to xrefs would be different than anyone elses.  IIRC 360 is even less configurableas far as local folder...

There's also lag time on the synch.  refreshing an updated 259Mb file to dropbox takes a fair amount of time on my home system, so depending on the connection speed to/from remote servers: If user A 10' one cube over updates a file user B is xreffing in, there will be a lag while A synches changes up to host, and host synchs changes down to B.  20 minutes?  vs 10 seconds on a local server.

We are using an organized project structure... One that will be enduring some minor changes to streamline moving forward regardless of local or cloud-based server upgrade (I'm mapping that, and our new share folder structure now)... Part of the task of restructuring our data, but unrelated to this specific topic, is that I've inherited an environment where we've historically used an application called Alchemy to organize project related documents, correspondence, etc. which is entirely cumbersome... Another topic for another thread.

Nonetheless, you bring up a great point of consideration... One that I can only speculate on, having never used a cloud-based environment.

What I can say, is that we're currently on a +/- 70MB/s bandwidth connection for internet (everyone streams audio/video throughout the work day, in addition to some iMeet/GoToMeeting/webinars, etc.), and that were we to migrate to a cloud-based environment, those 2TB backup drives we're currently using would be reallocated as expansion drives for our new workstations (since our boot drives are SSD). Even the 27" XPS all in one I just purchased and setup for the owner is i7, 2TB, 8GB RAM, Win8, so we *may* be fine with simply upgrading our bandwidth package.

I agree that this scenario would be cumbersome to deal with on the task by task level though... How seamless it may, or may not work would be the deal breaker, methinks.

Some of the companies I've had time to research offer a 30 day paid trial prior to any contracts, but I may want to coordinate such that we're only testing this new schema with a single new project that I'm working on dedicatedly for a bit, in order to truly evaluate how it works in a real-world project (one that I could easily replicate back to my local network if it's not working out).


In any event, I'm enjoying this discussion greatly; thanks to all for your comments.

Cheers

[ronjonp]

FWIW..

Just from a performance perspective, I'd have a local server and perhaps backup to the cloud. We have a remote office and a similar interwebs connection and drafting large projects is fairly painful.

[cadtag]

A local box of some kind would be needed for the License server as well, presuming of course that an organization is taking advantage of network licensing... Depends on the situation of course, but IME a 30% reduction in the number of CAD seats actually needed.

If content explorer is of any use to someone, that also would require a local server to crawl and index.  It's not something I personally can use here, but YMMV.  I expect that Winodws search and index services would be similarly affected.

[BlackBox]

when you get a good handle on what you want, plz post a summary of your findings.

Will do. 

... Here are my findings:


:: Cloud-Based Solution ::

Being such a small company, our CFO is essentially part time, and works for multiple companies in similar capacity. One of those other companies currently uses Rackspace.com for their cloud-based solution, and they absolutely love it. Supposedly, they're leasing their cloud-based server for +/- $500 per month, supporting 24 employees, etc. which sounds way too good to be true for what I've been looking at in a dedicated server + two migrations to bring us current from Server 2003 up to Server 2013.

So... I called Rackspace.com this morning in order to make a true apples-to-apples comparison... If that was a reasonable monthly lease price, then we'd be jumping at it today without hesitation.

In order to come close to, not even match the performance level we've specified with Dell's configuration, and even if we brought our own SQL license, their 60GB Performance Server would run us +/- $2,900 for an estimated 730 hours per month of dedicated, managed server access.

That does not even account for the required upgrade in bandwidth, and the Rackspace.com reps strongly urge the usage of at least a dedicated T1 (T3 prefered).


:: Dedicate, In-House Server ::

After considering several options, the server I ended up selecting is a 1U, Dell PowerEdge R620 rack server:

• Dual Oct-Core Intel Xeon E5-2640v2 Processors, 2.0GHz, 20M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT, 8C, 95W, Max Mem 1600MHz
• Four 16GB RDIMM RAM, 1600MT/s, Low Volt, Dual Rank, x4 Data Width
• Two 300GB 15K RPM SAS 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Hard Drives, RAID1
• Five 600GB 15K RPM SAS 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Hard Drives, RAID5
• 3 years Dell ProSupport, immediate phone, and remote server access, or next business day on-site service
• Dell ProSupport can be extended to 7 years max

... Which will replace the pair of out-of-warranty, 32-bit Dell PowerEdge tower servers we're currently using, and frees up another office in the process.

All-in-all, while we're paying one-time, lump sum, this equates to +/- $650 investment over 36 months, and ends up being +/- half of that even with the additional cost of the 7 years extended warranty/support... If we grow faster than anticipated, it's expandable, and have the option of a plug-in NAS, another in-house, or cloud server for fault tolerance, etc. down the road.

We're also upgrading to a Dell PowerConnect 2848 (48 port) Gigabit switch, and maintaining our nightly backup using the 2TB external USB drives we already have for the time being; as NAS is not cost effective enough to justify replacing/reallocating said external drives at this time.


In turn, once the migrations are complete, I'm debating installing the hardware key ICPR licenses we currently use on even more out-dated Dell Dimensions (former workstations I've since replaced), to either the new workstations we have, or the soon to be available PowerEdge tower servers for the better processing speed, bus, etc. and add them back to the domain as 'library' computers that our engineers remote into from their ICPR calculations... I want to test one in each configuration to see how bad of an impact on their daily work it would in fact be.

Separately, you may want to skip Symantec's newest backup software, as the network side doesn't run on 2013, only 2010; which is ironic as the client side does run on newest... Supposedly they're working to correct that. Instead, we're just going to renew our existing backup software, which has not presented any issues to date.

We're also upgrading to MS Office 365 Midsize Business; Right now each per user, per month fee is reduced through Dell for less than what MS Lync is alone, and it provides all Office Professional applications on up to five devices per user (i.e., work, home, mobile, etc.), intranet space, a client facing website (if you don't already have one), web-based email (again, if you don't already have an exchange server), as well as plenty of OneDrive space for document sharing, etc. with clients in lieu of, or in addition to your FTP server.

Cheers

[ronjonp]

IMO .. Nice choice BB .. I have something similar and now my throughput speed is limited by Gbit tech. All is more than well on our part ... but we're a a small company.