Small Business Server help

Dribbles

Dribbles

Dribbles

Associate
Joined
1 Jul 2009
Posts
207
Location
Edinburgh
Hi All,

I was looking for some advice. I work for a small voluntary organisation with 12 staff each with their own computer linked to a server. We are looking to buy a new server and have had a quote from our I.T company for close to £5000 for server, onsite backup, remote backup and installation.

Obviously this is a lot of money and I think we could probably do it much cheaper. Our current server is a Dell Poweredge 420 which is ancient, but which still works well enough.

I don't know which server exactly they are quoting for as they haven't stated, but it is a Dell Server, Quad Core 2.4ghz, 16gb ram, 3x500gb hd. £2045.00. To me it seems excessive considering we currently only use 21gb of space on our current server!

Do we really need onsite backup (2x2tb) and remote backup (3x750gb)?

Do we need a Dell UPS External Battery Module for 500W as well?

They've also stated it'll take three days to set it up, is this reasonable?

Sorry for all the questions, I know lots about gaming pcs, but next to nothing about servers! Any advice would be appreciated, thanks
 
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The server does mail, not sure what IIS and AD is, but it doesn't host a website or anything. We use it to access our desktops from home.

It's not the end of the world if the server is down. It's only really used 8am-8pm.

As to how valuable the stuff is, obviously it's valuable, but 21gb and mail to backup, will it really require all those backup solutions?
 
Thanks for responses, I understand that it is up to us to decide about backup solutions.

How about the server's specs, are they reasonable for a server that's connected to 12 computers, does mail, AD, backup on and offsite?

For the onsite and offsite backup do we need that much storage?

Does a new server take three days to setup?

Thanks again
 
According to the quote the remote backup is a 3x750gb hds plugged into local NAS (I don't know if that makes sense!). It seems to be using software called shadow protect.

Our current backup is backing up to tape in the server, which is not covering everything anymore.
 
Ok, by the sounds of what people are saying:

I could get it much cheaper if I did it myself. However, I lack skills to do this.
The more comprehensive the backup solution, the better.
We should probably have a backup policy
UPS is useful, but not essential
 
Thanks Harry, that looks a bit more realistic. We don't need a top of the range server, the one we have at the moment works fine, we just don't have proper backup and are scared that it's on its last legs.

So would it be 1066mhz ddr3 ram we would need for the server?

The rdx are just tape drives that continuously backup data ?
 
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Thanks for your response - They handle the day to day running of our computers and servers which isn't included in the price.

I understand that we should have a good idea of what we require, but when you are a charity with next to no knowledge of servers and backup it is very difficult to have a clear picture of what we require. That is why we asked for a general quote.

I think we will have to have a good discussion as an organisation before we get back to them.
 
The cloud suggestion is quite interesting. I assume that the backup of data becomes Microsoft's (or whoever's) responsibility. We probably wouldn't need as much I.T support either.

The only potential problem would be databasing, we have a custom database software that everyone accesses. This would probably need to be migrated to a microsoft database.
 
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