Hello everyone,
Ok, so I recently took a position for a local tax firm, we currently have 23 offices, none of which have more than 10 employees. Of the 23 offices, 22 of them use Windows7 on a client to client network and a Win7Pro machine works as the data server. This seems to be an economical and effective way to manage such small office networks.
The only stand alone office is corporate. Although we still only have less than 10 employees the previous IT person deemed it necessary to run 2 windows 2008R2 servers, 1 as the every day data server, and the other as a data server for the master database that we hold from all the offices.
These servers are not being properly used, they are nothing more than a glorified data server. We are NOT using active directory, nor mail server nor a web server. To me, this seems like buying a 50,000 square foot facility for a 2 man operation.. a huge overkill.
To boot we also have a Dell Poweredge R620 blade that is just sitting by not being used at all...
So, I would like to get the advise of others as to what the best course of action would be in your opinion?
Personally, My idea was to take the poweredge blade, partition it to hold 2 Windows7 copies, then run both the databases through that, this would give me 2 machines with 16GB Ram each and enough power to keep things moving. Am I trying to over simplify things? Is there a security risk I am not seeing with converting the corporate office to a client to client network running Windows 7 Pro?
Thank you for any advice.
Bob