Need a Server Recommendation for Small Business

Question

I couldn't find a forum category that really fit for my particular question so I'll post it here. We need to replace two aging servers with one new server tower with Small Business Server. I'd like to have SBS 2008 Premium (unless you recommend against 2008) and RAID 10. Which server model do you recommend and which RAID controller should I use? It would be nice to have high-speed hot-swap SAS drives but the cost of that might keep us down to some 7200 RPM hot-swap SATA drives instead. I would also like to have two Gigabit NICs so I can do NIC teaming but that isn't an absolute requirement. For a bit of background, I used to work for another company where I performed server installs but now I'm working as a network administra so I was more in touch with the server world then. We used HP servers and I liked them but I've always been a Dell fan so I'm shopping here. In my experience it's pretty critical that you get the right server for the job. We'll be using this server to share files and two network printers on our network, perform DNS and DHCP, and host Quickbooks 2008 and Exchange Server. There's some possibility that we'll use SQL Server as well, although, to begin with we won't be using it. We've got 7 workstations that use the network fairly heavily every day and an additional four workstations that are only used occasionally or very lightly (one hosts a time clock app that uses MS Access). We would also like to perform nightly image based backups using Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 together with the RD1000 or RDX drive. As far as the price goes, we'd like to keep it as low as possible while still getting the right machine for the job - something that is stable and will keep up with our existing equipment. Our existing file server is a Dell PowerEdge 2650 Rack Mounted server running Server 2003 Enterprise (which is the wrong OS for what we're doing). It has two hard drives in RAID 1 hosting the OS and three hard drives in RAID 5 hosting the files. The RAID controller is a PERC 3/Di and the hard disks are 73GB SCSI 10K RPM drives. It also has dual NIC with NIC teaming and redundant power supplies, which is not a requirement but would be nice to have. Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Dev Mgr · Answer

I'd suggest you post in the server hardware section, instead of Dell|EMC SAN Storage. If however, you're looking for a SAN solution, you're in the right place to ask, but you'd want to specify how many servers you intend to connect, if you want to go fiber channel or iSCSI (or maybe some of both), do you need snapshot support, any data replication (mirroring), etc.

HKColorado · Answer

Thanks for your response. I don't need a SAN so I posted this over in the general hardware section. Thank you.

PowerEdge Hardware General

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