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It's Time To Consider A Home Server
Using a home server
- You can plug in an external drive. But external drives can sometimes get misplaced, and you're still going to need to back them up. It's much more effective and convenient to have a centralized resource that is reachable from any device on the internal network.
- Home servers can also be a destination for backups. In fact, one of the biggest benefits of home servers is that they can be configured to use RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks). RAID allows you to create a volume from a batch of drives. If any one drive fails (and they do!), no data is lost. All you do is remove the failed drive, insert another, and the RAID completely rebuilds the volume.
- If you have more than one computer at home, a home server can help you keep everything in sync, too, and let you work on projects from any machine in the house. If you have multiple family members, you can use a server to share documents across multiple devices.
Understanding server hardware
Server hardware comes in a wide variety of capabilities and prices, ranging from this Dell PowerEdge T40 server up to server farms capable of running a large business.
The PowerEdge T40 comes with 1TB of storage, which is relatively little for a modern business. But it has three drive bays, which means there's room for a boot drive and a two-drive RAID. You could add two 10TB, $367 Toshiba drives to the T40 and have yourself a very capable starting server.
When you're picking out a home server, keep in mind that you don't need a massively powerful CPU. Most servers come with a 1GB Ethernet connection and that's usually fast enough, especially since most home users will connect over slower Wi-Fi. It's for a similar reason you don't really need SSDs in your server; you won't be sending data fast enough to fully utilize their speed.
But if you want to consider a more powerful class of servers, take a look at the new Dell PowerEdge T550 Tower Server. It’s a smart choice in terms of its expansion capabilities.
Do your employees need a home server?
If you run your business from home, having a home server makes obvious sense. But what if you normally run your business from an office? Should you equip your employees with home servers? That really depends on the employees and what their jobs entail. If your employees are producing video, absolutely consider home servers, because backups will be a problem.
Also keep in mind that if you place a Windows server in an employee's home, you can use powerful home-to-office server communications entirely within Windows Server's secure and trusted environment.
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Intel® Core™ Processors
Learn More about Intel