Integrated Small Business Servers

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Nitix Scalable Services Structure (NS3)

The IT needs of organizations vary depending upon many factors including the number of employees, the locations of the organization’s offices, and the actual usage of the services and resources of the IT infrastructure. As organizations grow, they require an IT infrastructure that is able to expand to reliably accommodate additional load, without overburdening the organization with additional expenses.

Nitix Scalable Services Structure (NS3) provides the ability for multiple Nitix-powered servers to work collaboratively together to meet the IT infrastructure needs of larger organizations, as well as the needs of growing smaller organizations. Whether you need to have multiple servers on your network to handle workload, to provide sufficient space for storage, to run applications, to connect your remote offices, or you simply want to dedicate a server to a specific function (for example, a dedicated email server), NS3 makes setting up and managing a reliable multi-server network easy. Deploying multiple servers using NS3 can reduce IT expenses associated with network management, licensing, and network connectivity.

NS3 Fundamentals

In a NS3 network there are two types of servers: a single NS3 Master server and one or more NS3 Slave servers. Administration of individual user accounts and team (shared) accounts is centralized on the Master server. All user and team accounts are licensed to the Master server. Depending on an organization’s requirements, its network administrator assigns user and team accounts to the appropriate “node” servers. A node server may be any of the Slave servers, or the Master server itself. Slave servers can be set up to offload the master server, or to perform specific tasks.

NS3 Features and Benefits

Scalable Licensing

With NS3’s user licensing model you can add additional servers to your network without having to pay for additional client access licenses (CALs) for your existing licensed users. No matter how many NS3 servers a particular user needs an account on only one user account is required for that user.

Centralized Account Management

Within the IT infrastructure of a larger company, certain users and team accounts may exist on all servers within the company while other account may exist only on only a few servers, or even on just a single sever. When it comes time to make changes to user accounts and permissions remembering which accounts on which individual servers need to be updated can be a nightmare. With NS3, all accounts on your servers are controlled from one intuitive interface, making it easy for an administrator to effectively mange your user and team accounts.

Automatic Synchronization of DNS Networking Information

As your organization expands and you open up new offices or have employees working from remote locations minimizing your monthly connectivity expenses without increasing network downtime can be difficult. With NS3, the DNS information required to keep your servers connected to the Internet and to keep your virtual private network (VPN) of geographically dispersed servers up and running is automatically synchronized between all the Nitix NS3-enabled servers on your network.

This means that you can reliably grow your VPN using the most cost-effective Internet connectivity services available to you (services with dynamic IPs, like DSL and cable). With a NS3 VPN, each office on your VPN can connect directly to every other office so your network is easy to scale because you do not have to worry about running all of your VPN traffic through a single central location.

Example of How NS3 Works

Our example organization has three offices: a head office, a west coast office and an east coast office. Every user in the organization needs to have a corporate email account, a place to store their files and the ability to access and use the organization’s order entry and customer management application.

With NS3, this organization can choose to dedicate a single server to each of the tasks required to meets its IT infrastructure requirements. NS3 will help this organization save on licensing costs, reduce administration overhead, minimize connectivity expenses and maximize the uptime of their network.
In the head office three servers will be deployed: an email server or all eighty users in the organization, a server to store files, and a server to run the order entry and customer management applications. Two more servers will be deployed to connect the remote offices to head office, and to provide local file storage.

Master server functionality will be activated on the email server. Eighty CALs will be purchased for the Master server so all employees in the organization will be able to have corporate email accounts. A file server and a server to run the organization’s order entry and customer management applications will be added as Slave server nodes, in head office. To connect the networks in the east and west coast offices to head office, and to each other one Slave server will be deployed in each of these remote offices. The Slave server nodes in the remote offices will also provide local file storage for all remote employees.

 NS3 Minimum Requirements

• One Nitix SB, Nitix SE, or Nitix PE server with Master server functionality activated
• One Nitix Slave server node
• NS3 Server Node Options
• Anti-Virus protection
• Second and third-year Software Assurance
• Software Raid for Slave Servers

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