Intranet Basics:

• What is an Intranet?
• Potential Intranet Costs
• Intranet Applications
• External Hosted Options
• Open Source Intranets
• Intranet Outsourcing
• Intranet Design Errors
• Administration Errors

Intranet Advanced:

• Securing Your Intranet
• Using Multiple Servers
• The Client-Server Model
• Promoting Your Intranet
• The GTD Concept
• What is Intranet 2.0?
• Standardized Intranets

Intranet Tips:

• Creative Intranet Uses
• Saving Storage Costs
• Intranet Myths Debunked
• Using RSS on an Intranet

Intranets & Google:

• About Google’s Intranet
• Using Google Mini

Using Multiple Servers on an Intranet

If you run the classic “Mom and Pop” type business, you won’t need multiple servers for your intranet. Period. The cost would just be too high, and the benefits would be too minimal. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have medium and even larger sized businesses. If you fall into this category, you should be investing in multiple servers; if you haven’t already. Sure, it is extra work, but it has some clear-cut benefits you can’t refuse.

Why Use Multiple Servers?

It sounds like a lot of work to install and maintain five or more servers, we know. But there is always the need to scale your intranet’s network to encompass a larger radius. If, for instance, your business booms and moves into a building four times the previous size - your intranet infrastructure will suffer.

First let’s look at the mechanics of an intranet. It commonly may have only one server to handle many different tasks. Email, FTP, web servers, DHCP - the list goes on. If all of these services are bundled onto one server - you’re asking for certain disaster.

Let’s think of this in terms of a confectionary jawbreaker. These hard candies have different colored layers, and in our case these are our different services. The jawbreaker as a whole is your one server. Imagine one layer becomes corrupt, and crashes. The whole server is most likely going to come down with it - you might as well through the entire jawbreaker away.

Now let’s say instead that we took each layer, and gave it its own single-colored jawbreaker. If that same service crashed, there would only be one service down - not your entire network. This is referred to as redundancy, something network administrators have come to appreciate. But if we can assign each server to do a single task, how far can we take this redundancy of ours?

Types of Servers

There is a nice list of server types you could install - but not all necessarily apply to intranets. Some are more suited for internet use instead - so we can skip over those. Of course it isn’t uncommon to have your intranet tied to the internet itself, so we’ll cover common web server applications as well.

Email Servers

Email servers are important for the intranet’s users to communicate. Likewise, they are almost always problematic. So many things can go wrong with email servers that running an email service with other services is just suicide.

The email server in question handles requests, and sends mail to the proper location. This requires a certain amount of resources to perform. The larger the network, the more performance is generally needed. With a single server it would be impossible to accommodate the needs of a large intranet - thus the dire need for multiple servers.

File and Print Servers

Continuing with our redundancy is printing and storage services. How many times have you tried to print something, only to recognize that the network was down? And how many times have you needed a single file on the network to complete an important task, to see that you couldn’t access it because of an unrelated service crash?

File servers are simple to install and maintain - but they do usually require a lot of disk space. They are the brain of the network, in a sense. They provide vital files and information to users who request it. If you were to bundle this service onto one server, you may just run out of disk space before you realize maybe an investment in a new server was a good idea.

Print servers, on the other hand, are also relatively easy to maintain. In most cases print services don’t cause too much trouble. It would still be disastrous, however, if a print service were bundled on a single server that somehow crashed from other services. Imagine going a few days without printing - your business would likely plunge into a state of inefficiency.

DHCP and Web Servers

DHCP, or dynamic host control protocol, is a real time saver. It can automatically assign computers on the network with dynamic IP addresses. This is especially useful for offering wireless intranet access, or even remote dial-in capabilities. If this service were to go down, your network will crumble. It is important to keep it away from other accident-prone services as much as possible.

Web servers are great for implementing access control permissions. If you want to set restrictions on a certain area of the intranet (or internet) this can be achieved with the web server. This is also where many security measures can be implemented - such as defending against common network exploits.

Closing Comments

You may not need a separate server for every service, depending on what you need. It does, however, help improve troubleshooting a downed network, and also does wonders for redundancy. If a single server is causing too much downtime, or is being overloaded from performance issues, consider balancing the load across multiple servers.

It may be costly at first, but the lack of downtime is often well worth it in the long run.