Next stage of my first business customer, getting a server set-up (storage, sage etc)

So its not worth using the one 250GB drive that comes with the microserver? meaning I would have to purchase just one more?

Yeah I think I will just add another 2 x 250GB drives to the order and get it over with.

All hardware will be purchased, I am sending them a hardware list, they send me the money, I give them the invoice and any invoices from supplier, then after its all complete I will invoice them for my services.
 
So far hardware is coming to a cost of £427.00

Thats
NL40
8GB RAM
2 x 1TB RE4
2 x 250GB RE4

Seems quite high, thats without my service charges on top

Hopefully they will go for it...
 
DJMK4 said:
So its not worth using the one 250GB drive that comes with the microserver? meaning I would have to purchase just one more?

Yeah I think I will just add another 2 x 250GB drives to the order and get it over with.

All hardware will be purchased, I am sending them a hardware list, they send me the money, I give them the invoice and any invoices from supplier, then after its all complete I will invoice them for my services.
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I've seen low-end HP servers come with a 250GB WD RE4 but also come with also a desktop-grade Seagate. As somebody else has mentioned, you could get a pair of 1TBs and give 100GB to C: for the OS and then the rest for data.
 
If I do it that way and just go for 2 x 1TB drives, this will still offer redundancy over both the C partition and data partition also though?

If the one drive goes kaput, the OS partition and data will still remain on the other "working" drive until the failed disk is replaced meaning they still should have a functioning server os and access to data

can you confirm this?
 
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DJMK4 said:
If I do it that way and just go for 2 x 1TB drives, this will still offer redundancy over both the C partition and data partition also though?

If the one drive goes kaput, the OS partition and data will still remain on the other "working" drive until the failed disk is replaced meaning they still should have a functioning server os and access to data

can you confirm this?
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Correct.

With regards to the price, £427 is nothing for a business server and I wouldnt get too hung up on price with them as you could spook them. Have some confidence in the solution your selling (please dont take that the wrong way) and the customer will have confidence in you and what your providing even if its a lot more. You cant go wrong with selling RAID disks as part of your server, the customer will love it as they'll know their data is safer and they'll have more confidence in you as your being seen to act in their best interests.
 
Sent them a hardware quotation, I am not including any mark up on the parts, however I will make back any extras in service charges, just got to work out how much I will be charging them for the services now.

Dont want to undersell my costings, however dont want to go OTT either. Do people tend to use fixed pricing when doing stuff like this? I have always charged by the hour and just estimate the times for the work being carried out.

I always see people charging quite a bit but I can never seem to work out how much to charge, generally I charge £35 per hour, not sure if this is too low, and for instance
 
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It differs per customer really as good customers take up less time than some of the more difficult ones so I tend to allow a bit extra for where I know things will be more difficult.

Parts wise, you need to add a small margin on allow for your time speccing the system and also any warranties/failures you might have to honour. I normally do cost +15% or give the option of the customer buying everything themselves with a provided shopping list.

Labour will vary wildy between companies and will depend on your experience and abilities. I charge £50 per hour + VAT which is a fair rate for my experience. Allow yourself enough budgeted time for a server migration, for example I allow 60hrs from start to finish for a 50 user SBS migration. Sounds like a lot but after doing +30 of them, its about right to do the job properly.

The best thing you can do is manage your customers expectation of costs realistically. The biggest stumbling block initially is getting over your own perhaps limited perceived worth. If you know you can do the job properly and conscientiously then charge at least the going rate once you reach that stage. If you don't charge enough, you'll always be stuck at that rate with that customer and you might not be able to maintain that rate long term.

Sorry, a bit rambley.
 
It's ok, I will keep this in mind on the service charges, with regards to parts I have missed out on the Margin thing I guess for this one as I have already sent the parts prices across, although usually I do charge margin on parts, I may let this one slip as I kind of know the guy personally, so I guess I could do him a small favour of no margins this once.

However I will keep firm but fair proceedings on any service charges when it comes to the work carried out as you are 100% correct, if you a bit leaner on the costings of you work, they will expect this all the time from then on.

Thanks
 
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We all like playing with servers etc, don't get me wrong - i'm no different, but if they are put off the server idea due to the cost, look at a SaaS accountancy solution such as quickbooks or brightpearl, in effect you'll be offloading the hardware and DR side of things to a third party who has the infrastructure/skills to support it properly, while getting a comprehensive LOB application for very little up front cost for your customer.

You'll find a lot of small business' will find this pricing model attractive, they don't have to worry about backups, can access it from home or the office 24/7 - and ultimately sell it to them as a 'solution', something you will manage and support for them as the 'IT Expert', charge them a monthly support and consultancy fee for doing so - this way you retain their business, have a predictable income month on month, and the customer has a comprehensive system with very little upfront costs to pay.

I'm finding a lot of customers, especially really small ones (1-10) are moving over to SaaS based solutions because as for hosting internally

1.) they can't stomach the cost of server, backup apparatus and a UTM.

2.) no one wants the responsibility of swapping the backups out everynight, again additional costs for offsite backups and/or USB drives etc

3.) They do just 'one thing' all the time, and they don't need a full blown SBS or essentials server and all the frilly bits such as exchange, sharepoint, AD DS etc.

and remember for very small offices, setting them up in a 'workgroup' is usually sufficient especially for basic things like sharing files off a small nas and perhaps one office printer. It's all about fitting the solution to the requirements, and being smart/frugal about it - that's how you'll be profitable and make a success from it ultimately.

Just a thought....
 
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True, I was thinking about cloud applications for their solution, however, I thought they are going to need local storage anyway, which means they are probably going to spend money on a RAID based NAS (at the very least) Which for a decent one is going to cost anywhere from £250+.

There is no qualms about backups they are happy enough doing this obviously I will schedule and set-up email alerts to myself

From the sounds of it yesterday when I gave them my rough price they seemed fine with product costings, said I would finalise it was a rough guestimate and the OS is not an issue.

I think it would be better for them in the long run than having a NAS device which limits them in the long run if they want to do more with the server, and why pay for cloud application hosting when you already have a server you can utilise, its not exactly demanding, set-up a shared directory to store sage data, point the local installs of sage to this directory, then include the sage data in nightly backups

I will still get any monthly or agreed support charges from support of their server, workstations and small network.
 
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Definately worth totalling your hourly charge and + 10%, this is where you make up any margin you lost out on parts etc also.

Its very easy to undersell yourself, by thinking 'my customer isn't going to want to pay this' however they are getting your time and expertise. If you wanted something from him he would be charging you a good amount too (dependant on what he does).

We tend to charge a fixed price for installation, once we know their setup and can guage whats involved, it sounds like you know roughly what you need to do and you know their current setup enough, so from that you should be able to guestimate whats involved and time required.

Just make sure he doesn't spring some till system or additional database on you at the last minute with a "oh, didnt you know we need this sorted too?"

Also work out the charge for any additional work in the future, such as new PC installation, Upgrades etc. If you are offering a break-fix contract then these are not part of it.

You should definately be building RAID into the server to minimise downtime if anything else, however its important to have some kind of monitoring so you can see if either raid is degraded, not sure if the microserver has any kind of HP monitoring tools, but if its software raid you could monitor the event logs and have it email you when the event is logged.

Do they have any means of testing the backup you will schedule like restoring a .txt file from the backup once a week? Its all very well having a backup but if its corrupt when you come to need it, its rather useless
 
We had quite a large customer call us about a email server that was chucking up errors on a drive . For some reason they got a local company to set it up :/ . we asked for the report from the server and even though the customer insisted it was raid 5 it had been setup as striped across all the drives.

The customer is now having kittens as back up wont work (local or cloud) and we cant swap the drive.. He is chasing the local company as they had said they would do raid 5 .

Always build in some redundancy into everything as getting it all back can be a real pain and will be on your head !
 
tribz said:
Striped :eek::eek:

No backup :eek::eek:
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This for 200 users :P Atm there trying to get us to swap random server parts to resolve it but were having none of it .

We explained the thing we can suggest is build another server (correctly this time) and try and duplicate it but given they had no onsite backup and only via cloud.. which is now corrupt after the last backup that worked .

Should be a fun few days.. we are trying to be helpfull but kinda hard given the setup :P
 
Crikey!

I'd be keeping it at arms length also I think until they ok'd a new server.

Have you a plan in mind to get the data off? I'd be looking at a 'swing' migration to get the AD and the exchange stores onto a temp DC before swinging them back onto the final server.
 
We just cover the hardware . before we knew it was striped we checked the adu and showed 1 hdd failing . so sent em a drive . I then had a chat with there IT bod there and we realised what was going on.. we suggested (strongly ) not to swap the drive and to speak to who set the server up .

They have came back today asking for 4 new drives and backplane lol. I have refused.. marked call as chargable and warned everyone not to go near it so we shall see what happens .

But as soon as we touch it the blame will move to us and we will end up building a server to sort it .
 
Starting to set this up, although the microserver I have been sent doesnt seem to be detecting any drives :\

I have used the standard Seagate in as a test, and the 2 x Western Digital RE4 drives but still nothing tried fiddling about with BIOS but still nothing! Drives spin up on power on
 
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Hi all,

Is there any issues with regards to using the built in disk mirror feature in Windows? or is there a more proffered alternative to software RAID for the HP Microservers, anything with some good features would be a bonus like disk monitoring :)
 
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How have you set the sata controller mode in the bios ?
You should at least see the Seagate drive that it was shipped with, maybe check the connections or reset the bios.

MW
 
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