Server for accountancy company

[Randall8686]

My other half is setting up her own accountancy company, so she is going to need a secure server to store clients accounts. maybe host a sage server and generally back lots of important data up. She is likely to have a few members of staff relatively quickly if only part time working on some of these documents remotely. I want to try and keep all the data in house rather than use a cloud service.

So my questions are what OS would you use ? I have a IBM TS140 with a xeon that i use to play with and personally found the xpenology to be amazingly fun but this needs to be a secure "genuine" product so i can get support should anything go wrong. she will need access to files remotely too. Im thinking of hiring a IT company to set this up initially and provide suport when needed but want to do as much as i can myself and learn as i go. Im not an idiot and can happily set up VM's configure networks etc.

So what OS ?
what brand of server ? i hear dell's support is great.
How much power do i need ?
Ideally i want this to be rack mount.
What backup solution should i use? im thinking the Server in the house in a small rack along with UPS Switches etc. then a backup in the Garage just in case the house burnt down etc.

 

[Randall8686]

I was trying to avoid anything cloud as currently she uses Citrix and is absolutely hurrendous, this is a remote or hosted desktop. Its slow, crashes, laggy servers constantly down and when an app crashes you have to wait forever to be in a position to open it again. She has been in accounting a while and worked for a couple of the big four companies and has found their cloud desktops nothing but a frustrating and dissapointing. This is why i wanted to try and host locally if we can.

She works very fast and does not want te be reliant on cloud services if possible. The server will be in a server room out of sight, i dont mind having backups in the cloud but actual data to work on is so much nicer when its connected to your machine over gigabit lan.

I get what your saying but she has yet to find a remote desktop service that is anything like using a normal pc. My hands are a little tied and one of the reason she is stepping down from a fairly high position in the company is frustration with IT and citrix.

 

[Randall8686]

Thanks for all your comments guys we are trying to work out the best solution. The reason i menatiin citrix is she currently uses is at a practice and they have nothing but massive outages and issues with speed on a 300mbps connection(fairly sure its just citrix)

She has to use sage, Xero, quick books etc as depending what he clients want dependa what she can use. She is a Xero specialist and will try to convert to Xero when possible but some clienta refuse and will stick with sage, she charges more for this but if they pay the bill its up to them. I think we will go the synology route for now. With a backup onto a good cloud service. Looking at some of the rack mount synology stuff. Its expensive but i know DSM inside out as i have a big xpenology setup for media and surveillance etc backing up onto a genuine synology.

Im going the Dell route. On the laptop and monitors etc as their onsite support is great. With me often traveling she needs someone to fix somthing if im away.

I think she will use online services for the majority of stuff but needs some documents locally. She will often be sent documents via email and needs to store these in some way before working on them. Synology seems a safe bet for this and i notice they even offer cloud backup now

 

[Randall8686]

Be aware on the last three versions of Sage you cannot store the data on a NAS as they now require the Windows Sage Data Service.

thanks for this, I guess i could have a Windows VM running on the synology. She will mainly be using Xero but will need to store certain documents etc. I'm not going to pretend to know exactly what she needs but Synology also offer to sync your server with their own cloud service thus giving a good backup solution too. Sage is the real pain and is also so expensive