New IT Infrastructure with BIM Server

[Anonymous]

Hey there,

i'm a 20 years student with good IT knowledge and a friend of mine asked me to upgrade his architecture office. Atm there are about 20-30 people working with Archicad on maximum 5 projects. The all have Mac Pros (don't know exactly which generation) with Xeon CPU's and Snow Leopard installed.

The server is a Mac Pro with SL Server installed. Main tasks: User management (so they can login from every client to their user profile); address book; some other applications are running server side. Every workflow is very slow in this configuration (from the user login to the iCal or Mail apps).

The archicad projects are all within version 14 except the main is in version 12.

I considered the following setup:

-Mac Mini Server with Lion 10.7.2 (ignoring the font bugs) with 16GB Ram and to 512 SSD's in Software RAID 1 via Disk Utility

-Backups from the internal BIM Server will get saved to a connected NAS/storage server.

-TimeMachine will Backup the whole server system to some ext. HDD's AND the NAS/Storage Server

-all clients will be on Lion too and connected through Gbit wire.

In addition I have a few questions:

1. What do you think about this config in general?

2. How about the Backups especially?

3. In future the Mac Mini Server should ONLY run the BIM Server - no more tasks. Mail Server etc. will get outsourced. Can someone "guarantee" me that this setup will work flawless? I think especially the server-side user management downspeeded the whole thing.

4. A bit of topic: Is someone using an Exchange Server with Lion for Mail Adressbook and iCal? Or should I go better with Google Apps?

Best regards and thanks for all the helpful answers 😉
MG

[Haneef Tayob]

For backing up of the BIMServer, we also regularly do a manual export of all the bimserver projects. This exports one file per project, which is easy to restore. It's unfortunately not an automatic process, but is easy to do via the Bimserver manager.