Can a semi-technical staffer (me) successfully price and evaluate a new file server?

[bordelond]

@Mangetout

I wouldn’t discount cloud solutions on the basis of lag - I migrated a farm of servers from onsite to Microsoft Azure last year and there’s not very much difference in performance, overall. We did commission a small server for each site which is configured to cleverly cache frequently-accessed documents locally and sync changes with the cloud copy.

This would probably be an ideal set-up.

I suspect (don’t know for 100% certain) that our remote staff just gamely deals with whatever lag they experience with our current on-site server. They probably work more off of their laptops, and just save periodically to the server – that’s what I would do if I were remote and experiencing lag, anyway.

[Melbourne]

@bordelond

Good points, Mangetout. Thank you for your response. We’ve got a meeting with our IT contractor next week, so I can hopefully engage him intelligently about the issues you bring up.

The Quick Books thing (inability to support more than user at a time) is a big showstopper already.

Quickbooks can be easily shared (all you have to do is make sure you have licenses), but large reports are quite slow in the ‘easy’ configuration. You need to understand what it is they are doing, want to do, and don’t want to do.

1. There are several cloud services now that could replace QB. If you plan to expand the company, you should talk to accountants now, not wait until you are even more stuck.

2. Easy sharing means you install QB on each client, and just share the data files on the server. This used to work quite well (Win98, WinNT), but slowed down a lot on Win2K+ Win2012 tried to recover some of the speed: I don’t know how well the improvement works…

3. In some circumstances, adding a second user to a shared file slows everything down. A windows upgrade won’t fix that. It may not be your problem.

4. To avoid the file sharing and second-user slow down, an alternative approach is to let all users run QB on the server. This is limited to 1 or 2 users unless you pay terminal services licensing. This requires more CPU, and more Memory, and, in most cases, a second server. But QB runs better.

Are your users actually running QB on the server?

[bordelond]

@Melbourne

Are your users actually running QB on the server?

That’s what I am told. But I am not in a position to know. The IT vendor told us everything I’ve typed into this thread regarding Quick Books and why we can’t use all three licenses simultaneously.

[Mangetout]

It sounds like misconfiguration to me - I’ve never really touched quickbooks, but it sounds to me like there is supposed to be some sort of licence server on the back end, and the client software is supposed to connect to the server and check out a licence, if one is available - but maybe somewhere along the road, people forgot how it worked and just started running the program directly from the server.