Medium Sized company of 250 wants all Mac Network

[smcdrc]

So, I have a friend who has asked that I helped him out with his business. They have about 20 people in the office and about 230 sales reps(and growing) out in the field doing sales. Already, all their sales folks have been given a MacBook Air, iPad and iPhone. Most of their office staff are already Macs (MB Pro, iMac, Air). They eventually want to get everyone on Macs (even the accountant who is running Quickbooks)

Other than that, they don't have a lot of technical infrastructure. Their old IT person up a quit. They don't have

Here are some of the things I think they need:

1) Firewall in place
2) VPN (To allow the sales reps in)
3) NAS
4) Cisco Router for internal traffic


Some of the questions I have.

1) What more do I need to add to the above?
2) What's the best way to manage all the field devices (MDM, etc.)?
3) Best way to handle all the field laptop backups? (Novell Filer, Dropbox, etc?)

Any other advice is welcome.

 

[Altemose]

So, I have a friend who has asked that I helped him out with his business. They have about 20 people in the office and about 230 sales reps(and growing) out in the field doing sales. Already, all their sales folks have been given a MacBook Air, iPad and iPhone. Most of their office staff are already Macs (MB Pro, iMac, Air). They eventually want to get everyone on Macs (even the accountant who is running Quickbooks)

Other than that, they don't have a lot of technical infrastructure. Their old IT person up a quit. They don't have

Here are some of the things I think they need:

1) Firewall in place
2) VPN (To allow the sales reps in)
3) NAS
4) Cisco Router for internal traffic


Some of the questions I have.

1) What more do I need to add to the above?
2) What's the best way to manage all the field devices (MDM, etc.)?
3) Best way to handle all the field laptop backups? (Novell Filer, Dropbox, etc?)

Any other advice is welcome.

Here is the thing that I am going to say. In order to support a critical business like this I highly recommend that you consult a network engineer. MacRumors can help guide but when it comes down to the true getting the system to work an engineer can ensure that it happens.

Personally, I would look at a service like Google Drive or Dropbox for the sales teams. If you are using Google Apps for business, then the sales teams already should have a 30 GB Drive. This should be enough for back ups of their files. Managing the devices is probably going to have to be done through OS X Server and centralized images. I am not sure if the existing infrastructure is configured for this so you may need to get a good look at how they have it rigged.

 

[Consultant]

Talk to Apple Business team?
http://www.apple.com/retail/business/

 

[Rog210]

I'd suggest that if you don't know the answers to these questions, you shouldn't be attempting this kind of work.

 

[satcomer]

All I know that two and three could be solved with a smart NAS server like a Synology because with it you can install a VPN server along with many other packages.

 

[irnchriz]

For 250 macs you want to get a decent firewall/security appliance, grab a couple of 2012 Mac Mini servers running OD for resilience. You could have the server manage VPN or do this through the appliance. Add all the macs to the OD to manage logins.

Setup a DAS off of the server thunderbolt port for shared storage.

If you think you will need high data throughput then look at a switch with a 10gb link and hang a business class NAS off of it.