Buying your first server

There's a school of thought that says that, as far as a very small business is concerned, servers are yesterday's news. A simple Windows workgroup is fine for basic file and printer sharing. An inexpensive NAS can handle shared storage, while cloud-based email, storage and collaboration services are effective and affordable. Why bother with installing more hardware to manage in-house?

However, there's an alternative school of thought; one that points out that centralising all your vital business data and keeping it backed up is a good idea, or that keeping that data in-house, where you have control over who can see it and where it's accessible even if your internet connection goes down, is an even better one.

A server isn't just a piece of hardware; it's a platform that enables collaboration and organises the flow of information. Plus, with modern server operating systems, there's no need to see in-house hardware and the cloud as mutually exclusive alternatives. In fact, the two can work quite effectively together.

False Economies

While you can pick up an entry-level server or a cheap “microserver” for under £300, you need to think carefully about the investment. While a high-end, dual-processor server with enterprise-grade SAS RAID storage will be overkill for nearly any starting business, a bargain-basement server could turn out to be false economy.

Don't just consider the workforce and the applications your server will be managing for now; try and develop a picture of how both might evolve in the future. It's only once you've done so that you can really make plans.

It might also be tempting to make your first server by installing a server operating system on what some would call a “dressed up” desktop PC. It's a temptation to resist. While servers use components in common with desktop systems, they also rely on specialist hardware that's designed to ensure solid, uninterrupted operation.

Chassis and cooling systems will likely be designed to run more quietly and resist the ingress of dust. Server hard drives may prioritise reliability and management features over raw performance, while server motherboards will come with chipsets designed to enable more effective management and monitoring of the server hardware.

Even the network controllers may be different. After all, while your average desktop only has to traffic data from one system to the router, a server has to deal with traffic from multiple clients at the same time.

Whatever brand of server you opt for, you're guaranteed to face a bewildering selection of configuration options. The trick isn't to go for the cheapest or the best, but to try and hit the specification that most closely matches the needs of your business.

Performance

The more employees you have, the larger the files that they work with and the more streaming media content your server may be expected to deliver, the more CPU power and RAM that server is going to need.

A simple file and print server can get away with a dual-core Pentium processor or Celeron and 1GB of RAM, but more demanding applications and higher numbers of users will need something with a bit more oomph. The best advice is to plan ahead for future growth. Are you providing enough headroom for more employees? Is there room to scale up later? Can you upgrade the RAM (memory)?

Note that certain server operating systems have specific needs as well.  Windows Small Business Server 2011, for example, needs a minimum 8GB of RAM and a 64-bit processor to run.

Storage

First, think about capacity. How big are the files you need to keep live and not archive? How many of them are there? How much space will you need for future employees and projects?

Fortunately, hard disk storage is relatively cheap, so it makes sense to overspecify rather than underspecify, although opting for a RAID configuration (which we cover below) might affect this decision, as you're effectively doubling or even tripling the cost per GB.

You also need to think about the type of storage. For most entry-level servers, there's nothing wrong in opting for the kind of hard disk drive that you might find in a desktop PC; this will usually be referred to as a SATA drive.

However, if you're looking for something that will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year while handling the most demanding workloads imaginable, then a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drive is worth the sizable investment. They're simply better equipped to handle the job.

Redundancy

If part of the point of a server is to organise and protect your data, then losing access to that data I – even for a limited period – can have serious repercussions. This is why, while most desktop PCs work with a single hard drive, most servers use two or more in a RAID array. Should one drive develop a fault, any files or folders on it can be reconstructed using information found on another drive.

With two drives in place you can have a RAID 1 array, with all the data mirrored across two drives to provide a failsafe option; that is, if one drive fails then your data won’t be affected. Just swap out the failed drive with a new one.

With three drives you can have the added performance of a RAID 5 array, where data is striped across the drives along with “parity information”. This information enables the server’s drive controller to reconstruct the information should one hard disk fail.

Most servers will support a SATA RAID configuration using the drive controller built into the motherboard, but for higher performance, support for SAS drives or more complex arrays you may be required to specify a dedicated RAID controller, possibly as a discrete PCI-Express card.

Operating System

Any Linux aficionado will tell you that you can spend nothing, opt for a bare-metal server and install a Linux-based operating system, such as Ubuntu, yourself. However, this might be best left to the experts: getting to grips with your first server is hard enough without having to learn a new operating system too.

For a first server, you can't do much better than Microsoft's Small Business Server 2011 Essentials. It's simple to install, configure and maintain, it makes it easier to manage and back up both the server and the PCs on your network, and it's designed to work hand in hand with cloud-based email and collaboration services, including Microsoft's Office 365.

Manageability

Don't just look at the headline specifications. Find out what management features your potential server has. Does it have its own management chipset? What software and utilities will this work with? What kind of information will you be able to monitor and check? Manufacturer websites and PC Pro's reviews can be a useful source of information here.

Support

If the server is to be the engine of your business, you can't afford for it to break down for any length of time. Look carefully at the levels of service and support it ships with, and at when you can get support and how long it will take for help to arrive.

More advanced support services, such as Dell ProSupport, can be a boon for small businesses without internal IT staff, providing you with the next best thing to an in-house helpdesk should things go wrong. Dell ProSupport will even provide support for PCs, printers and laptops from specific other vendors, helping you manage and protect not just your server, but the other devices in your office.

What next?

Buying your first server doesn’t have to be hard work. Call Dell on 0844 444 4390 and its experts can find the perfect configuration for your business needs.

Wary of deploying and administering a server? Make Dell your IT Expert. Call Dell on the number above to find out more about Dell ProSupport.

To find out more about SBS 2011 Essentials click here.