small business upgrade/downgrade

A

adam@gmts

Geek Trainee
I work in a small office of three people total. We currently have a dell poweredge 1900 that is around 4 years old. We are running 4 pc's total outside of the poweredge. They all access the poweredge to get email via outlook through our company email, as well as access files from the main drive in the poweredge. I think that our current setup is overkill and is obviously way too noisy and hot for what we do in the office. We could operate on just a network between the computers except for the fact of our email and its obviously much more streamlined to access the files through an actual dedicated server. I just wanted some general opinions on if getting a good pc with quality components to replace the server would actually be a good idea or not and if so then any sort of advise is great and if not the same would be appreciated. Let me know if there is any more information you need to give me your opinion. Thanks.
 
adam@gmts said:
If the company grows within the next four years it will be by one person and that person will take up the computer that is currently unoccupied.
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Ok, so there won't be a need to use a server for virtualization. Since the server is a critical system for your company, I would suggest to purchase a system that is covered with a next-day replacement warranty. Options I can think of at this moment are the Dell PowerEdge T110 and the HP ProLiant 300. If these are too expensive, you could also look for refurbished models with an active warranty.
 
RHochstenbach said:
Ok, so there won't be a need to use a server for virtualization. Since the server is a critical system for your company, I would suggest to purchase a system that is covered with a next-day replacement warranty. Options I can think of at this moment are the Dell PowerEdge T110 and the HP ProLiant 300. If these are too expensive, you could also look for refurbished models with an active warranty.
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So then what you are telling me is that it is not possible to use a high performance pc in place of a server unit?
 
adam@gmts said:
So then what you are telling me is that it is not possible to use a high performance pc in place of a server unit?
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It is certainly possible, but what if a critical component like the CPU, RAM or the Motherboard fails? Is it acceptable if the server goes down for like a week or more until you have gone through the RMA procedure?

For a custom built machine I would suggest a CPU from the Intel Xeon series and 8 GB of DDR-3 RAM. Then use two hard drives connected to a RAID storage card that supports Write-Caching with a battery and set it to RAID-1. It should have enough power to be used as a server, and still not being overkill :)
 
RHochstenbach said:
It is certainly possible, but what if a critical component like the CPU, RAM or the Motherboard fails? Is it acceptable if the server goes down for like a week or more until you have gone through the RMA procedure?
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those items are pretty stable from todays standards but if any were to suddenly go out for some reason or another, it would not be an issue to go purchase another item and install it same day... my work does not deal with hi volumes of data simply because the files we work with are in the kb. and not eveyone is accessing files all day long either so its a very light sort of computing.
 
Is there a maximum budget to spend?

I came up with a possible server configuration:
  • Intel Xeon E5506 CPU
  • Intel Server S5500BCR motherboard
  • Kingston ValueRAM 8 GB ECC DDR3-1333
  • Enermax ELT720AWT-ECO II Power Supply
  • HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 RAID Controller (if you need some redundancy)
  • WD WD10EZRX 1 TB SATA (2x for RAID-1) (depending on your storage needs, you might need less/more capacity)
 
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