Hi all - I'm being asked for information on what it would entail if we wanted to consider switching from RAMP to self-hosting. I've done a search of the site and the forums, and maybe I'm just searching for the wrong things, but I can't really find any solid information. What I'm mainly looking to know is how much it would be estimated to cost, and a general idea of the additional staff we'd need to hire. If anyone has a little time and would be willing to post some details here or talk through it with me directly, I'd very much appreciate it! Thanks in advance.
Hi Alicia - we are self-hosted. I would be happy to talk to you about it via phone. Feel free to reach out to me at dfrederick@scfta.org to set up a time if you are interested. Thanks!
Depends upon you're current staff and what you can repurpose them to do, but you basically need a Windows-trained sysadmin, a backup sysadmin and a DBA. These roles are not necessarily full-time, but it is unlikely that you have any staff currently twiddling their thumbs about 4 hours a day. When we were self-hosted we had:
I'd say the roles took up half of the System Administrator's time, about a quarter of my time, and maybe 10-20% time for Help Desk and the Director. The upgrade schedule could increase this in some years.
Now, we had physical machines we had to provision and house: I don't know how the cost compares to using a virtual service such as Amazon or Azure, or how that affects downtime. Comparing the two, I'd say that in light of all the major problems last year, our downtime between RAMP and self-hosting was actually comparable in raw hours. The difference was that our RAMP outages have generally been brief (with some up to few hours last year) while our self-hosted outages were typically fewer, but catastrophic, like that one time a storm drain backed up and flooded our server room.
Alicia -I am now with an organization that is self-hosted, with years before that in consortium and RAMP environments. I would be happy to share observations with you; I will not have ready access to all of the costs, but I am keenly aware of the work involved. A phone call might be best.Clarkecweigle@floridastudiotheatre.org
Hi Alicia,
Like Gawain we used to be self-hosted. I agree with him in that while the RAMP outages seem to be problematic there are resolved far quicker then we could do inhouse. But to add something positive to the conversation here are PowerPoint from the last TLCC conference which outlines the different servers and thephysical requirements of the hardware necessary to run the environment.
https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Passthrough?itemUri=/tlcc/2018/Pres/08_06_Bas_System_Admin.pptm for the basics of Tessitura Server Administration
https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Passthrough?itemUri=/tlcc/2018/Pres/11_34_Server_Admin.pptm for Tessitura Server Administration
https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Passthrough?itemUri=/tlcc/2018/Pres/10_36_System_Admin_Beyond.pptm for Tessitura Server Administration Beyond the Basics
Alicia, our Tessitura environment resides in a data center and are in the process of migrating our Tessitura stack to Amazon currently. We moved our web stack to Amazon a few years ago and have been quite happy with our decision hence the reason we are moving everything to Amazon. If you would like to chat just let me know.