ALWAYS ON SBS . . .

[khushy]

I want to buy a RELIABLE Small Business Server for my office - the main reason is to run, 24/7 our internal-only client server database - must be Windows XP up to Windows 8.1 Pro compatible

MUST BE ALWAYS ON

Would one of these be a good choice - dont need a huge amount of storage as backups are done daily off site

Hewlett Packard Enterprise ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 server 1.6 GHz AMD Opteron

??

[jdwoodbury]

It would not be my 1st choice although HP do make good products. I would choose something from their ML range which offers dual power, redundant fans and space for a RAID 5 set with hot spare. Also don't forget a UPS device or battery backed write cache if you need to enable DB writes in the event of a power outage.

[shtu]

khushy said:

the main reason is to run, 24/7 our internal-only client server database

MUST BE ALWAYS ON

I do like the microservers, I own two of the slightly older ones, and one of them is on 24/7.

However, corporate use, database that must always be available? I would look at offsiting that via AWS or similar. I know it's long-term, but for a small shop they provide a level of resilience that would cost you a fortune to build for yourself.

[khushy]

I would love to put our database in the cloud - we have done this before via a virtual server - but our broadband is pants - we run off a 4g sim card - having the database local means its lightning fast and instant - anything else would be frustrating as I use it all the time

[UpTheIron]

How critical is this database? How long could you cope without it if the server failed?

Should you be looking at multiple servers is my simple point...

[khushy]

We have 3 machines here 2 x PC and one MAC - the data is backed up and stored in dropbox

If the main machine went down (the one running the server part) the other two machines can run the server - they are all ready set up to do that - its a 2 min job to download the data and start working again

[BigTZ4M]

Whatever you decide, might I suggest you plan for the fact that Windows XP and 8 are End of Life. While it may still work now the next time your server blows up you may find the hardware no longer supports the OS needed to run your application.

Best solution is of course to have software that supports modern operating systems, but if you can't do that then one way to mitigate it is to get your server but run the OS and application in a virtual machine on the server. By backing that image up you can then fire up your legacy OS & application on any hypervisor which will be supported by more modern hardware come the time.

[sjg]

I've run HP Microservers as my home storage for many years, they've been reliable - but that's more luck as there's nothing really server-grade about them, just a cheap PC in a compact box with some extra drive bays.

On version support, the earliest HP cover on the gen10 is Windows Server 2012 R2 - if you wanted to run something older you may struggle to get drivers for everything.

[rxe]

khushy said:

I would love to put our database in the cloud - we have done this before via a virtual server - but our broadband is pants - we run off a 4g sim card - having the database local means its lightning fast and instant - anything else would be frustrating as I use it all the time

Put database and application in the cloud? Not sure what you’re front end is - but that would make it as performant as an ordinary web page - e.g. PH is database + cloud based application that you access via a browser. Is that fast enough?

If you have a “fat client”, then yes, separating app and database is likely to hurt.

Modern hardware is cheap and reliable - get a cheap computer to run it on, and another cheap computer to put in the cupboard if/when the first one breaks.