Burger
Member
I work at a small business, with perhaps 9-10 people who use their computers all day. Our computers are a mix of both PC and Macintosh, and the PC's run either XP, Vista or Windows 7 (I know) while the Mac's are all 10.6
We have a NAS that the design and print team use, a Promise SmartStor NS4300, which provides 1.5TB of RAID5 storage. This is only used to store artwork and client files and serves no other purpose.
Then we have our 'server'. It's a cruddy old PC running XP, nobody uses it, it just sits in the corner and does its job. Its job is to run the mail server (Kerio Connect), FTP file server, the SQL Server Express accounting database and the NOD administration console. I originally set it up in a RAID1 config, and the other day one of the drives failed. Looking at it today I also noticed the northbridge fan has failed, and I convinced my boss to upgrade the entire thing.
So I need a new server, it doesn't need to be terribly powerful (the current one is a single core AMD Athlon), it doesn't need to run Microsoft Server 2008 or anything 'enterprise level'. I was looking through some of Dell's options (fuck me their customization site is terrible) and I'm not sure what Microsoft Windows SBS edition is, or if I need a PERC SAS controller and then the site crashed and it's not working now.
Does anyone here have any good advice about what I should buy? HP? Dell? Something else? Also I'm in NZ if that helps.
tl;dr crappy server broke at work, need something suitable for small business, cheap and reliable.
We have a NAS that the design and print team use, a Promise SmartStor NS4300, which provides 1.5TB of RAID5 storage. This is only used to store artwork and client files and serves no other purpose.
Then we have our 'server'. It's a cruddy old PC running XP, nobody uses it, it just sits in the corner and does its job. Its job is to run the mail server (Kerio Connect), FTP file server, the SQL Server Express accounting database and the NOD administration console. I originally set it up in a RAID1 config, and the other day one of the drives failed. Looking at it today I also noticed the northbridge fan has failed, and I convinced my boss to upgrade the entire thing.
So I need a new server, it doesn't need to be terribly powerful (the current one is a single core AMD Athlon), it doesn't need to run Microsoft Server 2008 or anything 'enterprise level'. I was looking through some of Dell's options (fuck me their customization site is terrible) and I'm not sure what Microsoft Windows SBS edition is, or if I need a PERC SAS controller and then the site crashed and it's not working now.
Does anyone here have any good advice about what I should buy? HP? Dell? Something else? Also I'm in NZ if that helps.
tl;dr crappy server broke at work, need something suitable for small business, cheap and reliable.
