If you stick with a server, back up to NAS/cloud and use drives that have a decent warranty period? Im not sure I would want the admin hassle of permissions/printers etc on a non AD solution. You never mentioned any accounts/erp type software which could require sql etc.
Alternatively, you could go whole cloud with 365/onedrive/sharepoint and no need for local copies (maybe backup to NAS if you you want to hold your own data locally for any reason).
Thanks for this. We don't use any accounts/erp software that resides on the server. When we bought the server initially, it was because we were going to buy a software solution that required an onpremise server. We decided that we didn't want to spend £10-20k on a piece of software when we could spend £200 a month on a cloud solution that was more targeting to our industry, so we now use the cloud solution and Quickbooks Online. We may switch to an onpremise system eventually, but not in the foreseeable future.
We do already use Office365 and I use my Onedrive account through that, but many of our company files are 1GB or more so using them on a cloud service isn't really ideal. I have thought of using a NAS for the backups instead of the second server/disk shelves.
Be careful with this sort of thought process when replacing enterprise kit. The 16x2.5" drives aren't chosen specifically for capacity, but both speed and availability. (Likely they are in Raid10, so 8x600GB usable = 4.8TB)
Between the faster spindle speed (likely 10k SAS drives), striping across so many drives, and the RAID controllers' cache the performance of such "old" technology is likely still leagues ahead of a 2 drive RAID1 array.
The availability (uptime) of smaller drives in RAID10 is also much better - smaller drives take much less time to rebuild, minimising the window of an additional failure
When I bought the server, it was a used server, bought from an auction site, then upgraded. With the drives and a few other upgrades (10Gb SFP NIC, etc) included, we spent about £500 on the main server. We then bought a second core machine for about £140 which is sat in the server room on the floor just in case anything dies, so we have parts to hand. In all honesty, the drives in the server were purchased as they were cheap, and we only needed about 1TB of usable space for our client data (having previoulsy been using a Dropbox account) plus extra space for the workstation backups. I can't remember off the top of my head what the RAID config is but 4.8TB sounds about right.
We've only had one drive fail so far and the server did rebuild relatively quickly. I can imagine how long it'd take on an 8TB+ drive.
Your 16x drives would have been specced that way for max performance [and maximum salesman commision]
These days you could replace them all with a few decent SSDs and get the same IO, with much less noise, heat and power consumption.
Whether thats an option depends on your organisations risk factor.
Can't see much point in having Windows Server on top of VMWare, unless there are other VMs running on there that arent listed. That could be a licence and maintenance cost you don't need.
You could certainly replace the backup server with something modern, but does that backup server also serve the purpose of disaster recovery in the event of your main server going pop?
Restoring from backup is timeconsuming, but not as timeconsuming as waiting for a supplier to deliver some kit for you to restore onto...
I have thought about replacing the 16 drives with SSD's, but HP servers are known for not liking third party drives so going for consumer drives likely would result in the server sending all fans to max (though haven't tried it). I might try it out on our spare server though and see what happens.
The reason for having Windows Server on top of VMWare was because I originally wanted a file server and the ERP software we were going to buy on separate servers. It also makes controlling the Windows server a bit easier (I can log into ESXi and reboot the server, or load iso's as virtual drives, etc rather than having to go to the server room), at the time I set it all up, it was also much easier (with my skill set) to backup the VM as a whole rather than backing up a bare metal server.
As above, I do have an identical server to use for parts or potentially as a replacement server, though the backup server can be accessed to retrieve any of the files needed in the event of the main server going down. The only thing I couldn't do immediately on the backup server is replicate the AD as the images would need to be loaded onto a new server, but as I have the spare server, it's not such a concern.
I did think about moving AD to Azure but I always find the pricing difficult to work out, plus our internet isn't the most reliable so I do have concerns about the viability of moving AD to the cloud.
