M
mrmills
Guest
note: I apologize if this is beyond the reach of this forum...if so, point me in the right direction and I'll go there! thanks!
Here's the question...
I'm part of a 12 computer office and we have been using a mostly dedicated (a workaide will check email on it once in a while) Dual 1.25 GHz power PC G4 with 512mb of RAM running Panther to serve files using Apple's built in filesharing capabilities and the software Sharepoints. The amount of information contained in the shared directory is 54Gb, as it contains all of our multimedia file backups, etc. We're a department within a university, and don't deal with much confidential data. We are all on OSX running panther, except for one laptop running Tiger.
All has been working fine, but we need to start serving our filemaker databases as well. These 8 databases are not huge--all are less than 7mb and several are less than 2Mb. Realistically, no more than 2-3 people will ever have a file open at the same time, and even that would be rare.
We have a budget of about $1750, and were planning on getting a new 1.9 Ghz Imac to act as the server, and using the software we currently have. We tend towards the compact machines as space/purchasing extra monitors is an issue.
Our IT department has recommended that we continue using a G4 along the lines of the one we have, but that we purchase FileMaker Server Edition, as well as OSx server, an investment of several thousand dollars.
In order to keep the total amount under budget, we were thinking of buying a mac mini and using that as our server, and using the built-in fileserving capabilities of filemaker 7 and our current Sharepoints set up. But perhaps we could make one of the software upgrades as well.
My questions are, which solution seems best? New machine? New software? The server editions just seem lke overkill when we have such small user numbers. Am I misunderstanding the purpose of server software? Help!
Thanks!
Here's the question...
I'm part of a 12 computer office and we have been using a mostly dedicated (a workaide will check email on it once in a while) Dual 1.25 GHz power PC G4 with 512mb of RAM running Panther to serve files using Apple's built in filesharing capabilities and the software Sharepoints. The amount of information contained in the shared directory is 54Gb, as it contains all of our multimedia file backups, etc. We're a department within a university, and don't deal with much confidential data. We are all on OSX running panther, except for one laptop running Tiger.
All has been working fine, but we need to start serving our filemaker databases as well. These 8 databases are not huge--all are less than 7mb and several are less than 2Mb. Realistically, no more than 2-3 people will ever have a file open at the same time, and even that would be rare.
We have a budget of about $1750, and were planning on getting a new 1.9 Ghz Imac to act as the server, and using the software we currently have. We tend towards the compact machines as space/purchasing extra monitors is an issue.
Our IT department has recommended that we continue using a G4 along the lines of the one we have, but that we purchase FileMaker Server Edition, as well as OSx server, an investment of several thousand dollars.
In order to keep the total amount under budget, we were thinking of buying a mac mini and using that as our server, and using the built-in fileserving capabilities of filemaker 7 and our current Sharepoints set up. But perhaps we could make one of the software upgrades as well.
My questions are, which solution seems best? New machine? New software? The server editions just seem lke overkill when we have such small user numbers. Am I misunderstanding the purpose of server software? Help!
Thanks!