Guys:
Good morning to all, thank you in advance for any and all replies. I am pondering a big question for the SMB market. With services like Crash Plan, Pertino, Windows Azure, what exactly should be considered onsite.
A few months ago, my friend AJ and SAM and Bill Kindle suggested I take a dive into using Windows Azure. I had the opportunity of a lifetime to meet AJ and SAM and talk deeply about my company and where we are headed. We are a small non profit organization based in Birmingham, AL that provided reentry services to our community and county. We started as a 4 team company and so far have expanded to about 35-40 staff members. Needless to say, the shift from a SOHO/Workgroup environment to a standard AD environment has been nothing but "fun" for a lack of words.
Upon testing a virtualized deployment of Windows 2012 Server DC on Windows Azure and using the Pertino client (SDN/VPN) and a Windows 7/8 client laptop, I was now able to tap into a remote file server in the cloud in under an hour with minimal fuss. That got my light bulb to burn brighter, what if we utilize it also for a DR point/node maybe using Crash Plan on the local end to two sites locally and even to Windows Azure or even with Crash Plan Central. That would give us multiple points to have back ups.
Well then came the other issue, were not on a AD environment yet (Don't worry I plan on making that change if all goes good this year, thanks to NTG). Well on the short side of things, a basic issue we have is a central place to store files/shares. I got to thinking well, we could use Bittorrent Sync (I see a few members of Spiceworks like it and use it for home/smb use) and maybe even throw a couple of NAS's to 2 different sites.
Does this seem convoluted? Feasible? Basically, taking a bittorrent sync app installed to laptops which keeps them synced back to file server would be workable or would just installing crashplan per laptop and feeding back to the same file server seem more workable? Good thing is Pertino allows me to already do what a normal AD environment would do just without the cable anywhere.
