Server for small office?

mauphie
15.May.2008 8.10am

[Technical Post (not type related)]

Our office is small usually 3, sometimes 4 people. And I’m the designated IT person, even though I know zilch about it. Anyway, the office continues to plug along, connected locally via routers and ethernet cables and we had to recently buy another external harddrive.

My questions to the Typophiles are:

Do any of you have a server for your small office?
What made you decide to get one?
Any suggestions/warnings about taking this road?

I’m not sure if our office even needs a server. But, the network I’ve managed to just patch together, combined with the ever-increasing need for storing/backing up files, makes me think that something needs to be done.

I’d love to hear your experiences!

Thanks

Gus Winterbottom
15.May.2008 8.22am

If all you need is more storage space, perhaps a NAS or a SAN would be easier to deal with than a server.

James Puckett
15.May.2008 8.40am

The nice thing about a files server is that you can have everyone keep their job files on it—well, you can try to make them do it, anyway—and then have one centralized location for file storage and backup. Hard disks are so cheap that its often less expensive to buy more space than it is to pay an intern to clean up job directories and archive old files. Need more storage? Slap another firewire drive on the chain. Designer calls in sick? Great, just open the job files and work on it without having to dig around on his machines for files.

Just make sure that you test your storage/backup/recover system often. Because this will also be a single point of failure!

mauphie
15.May.2008 10.24am

@Gus
I hadn’t considered a SAN, as that seemed more than we needed. And I had never heard of a NAS.
Thanks for giving me other paths to investigate.

@James
I thought file servers were less likely to fail (versus a regular old harddrive)? Right now we have a couple external harddrives that we back up old files, etc etc and I know that they won’t last forever. I though file servers had a longer life, right?

aluminum
15.May.2008 11.04am

I’m thinking of a SAN for home soon.

Especially since I have a few Windows boxes. I just got hit with a nasty virus and looks like I’m going to be reinstalling windows this weekend. Having my files on the C: Drive, in hindsight, is stupid. ;0)

A file server is just a computer with hard drives in it, so it’s going to fail as often as any hard drive would. Remember, hard drives have a 100% failure rate, so the key is redundancy. Ideally, that’d be a RAID set up, with an off-site rotation of another backup (tape or external HD).

mauphie
15.May.2008 11.22am

Oh, all this makes my brain hurt. There are days when I miss being in a big corporate office, when I didn’t have to deal with any of this!

SAN, RAID, NAS....time for me to do some research on these acronyms....

James Puckett
15.May.2008 11.43am

I thought file servers were less likely to fail (versus a regular old harddrive)?

Server-grade high speed hard drives are actually more prone to failure than consumer stuff because they use newer parts that haven’t had the kinks worked out (and because corporate clients buy expensive service contracts). But redundant arrays of drives can be put together to safeguard against a single drive failing. These devices can be as simple as an external drive with two discs in a mirrored configuration, which is probably what you want.

Just don’t count on this as a backup solution—99% of catastrophic data loss is a result of fire/flood/earthquake damage, and for a small office theft is next on the list. No matter how good the server is, keep a backup off site.

Gus Winterbottom
15.May.2008 11.48am

> Oh, all this makes my brain hurt.

Good thing I didn’t mention blade servers, then. ;-)

For network-attached storage (NAS), this PC Magazine guide will get you started.

mauphie
15.May.2008 1.06pm

Thanks guys!
You’ve given me some good options!

Blade servers? I don’t wanna even know.

concrete
15.May.2008 2.49pm