In your environment of <100 users there is nothing *wrong* with having a DC serve dual duty as a file server and you may have gotten a bigger bang for your buck at the time.
Performance Monitor is your friend - get a baseline for all of your servers - memory, cpu and disk metrics -- I'll leave the particulars for your research ;-) Once you know where you are today you can make a much more compelling argument to your CFO about what you need. Having facts and pretty graphs that show you are under utilizing existing resources, or straining others is powerful. It shows you are being proactive and will serve as a basis for you to make a plan for what you need to do. If you haven't done so already, fire up Visio and diagram your existing infrastructure and your planned infrastructure as well. This will aid you in your vendor discussions. Also, for your size organization and business I would seriously look at keeping e-mail outside, and maybe even other services as well. Take a look at this: http://www.microsoft.com/online/default.aspx That is a lot of bang for the buck. -Jeff Steward On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 11:41 AM, John Aldrich <[email protected] > wrote: > Yeah... I really should have listened to the local consultant instead of > listening to Dell, but I made the mistake of listening to Dell when they > suggested getting a couple large servers to handle everything instead of a > NAS box and a couple "Pizza box" servers to handle DC roles. Now I'm having > to go back and do what was recommended in the first place. > > Thanks for your input, Richard. I will try and take everyone's advice to > heart and learn what I can on my own. > > <snipped> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
