when you get a good handle on what you want, plz post a summary of your findings.
Will do.
... Here are my findings:
:: Cloud-Based Solution ::Being such a small company, our CFO is essentially part time, and works for multiple companies in similar capacity. One of those other companies currently uses Rackspace.com for their cloud-based solution, and they absolutely love it. Supposedly, they're leasing their cloud-based server for +/- $500 per month, supporting 24 employees, etc. which sounds way too good to be true for what I've been looking at in a dedicated server + two migrations to bring us current from Server 2003 up to Server 2013.
So... I called Rackspace.com this morning in order to make a true apples-to-apples comparison... If that was a reasonable monthly lease price, then we'd be jumping at it today without hesitation.
In order to come close to, not even match the performance level we've specified with Dell's configuration, and even if we brought our own SQL license, their 60GB Performance Server would run us +/- $2,900 for an estimated 730 hours per month of dedicated, managed server access.
That does not even account for the required upgrade in bandwidth, and the Rackspace.com reps strongly urge the usage of at least a dedicated T1 (
T3 prefered).
:: Dedicate, In-House Server ::After considering several options, the server I ended up selecting is a 1U, Dell PowerEdge R620 rack server:
- Dual Oct-Core Intel Xeon E5-2640v2 Processors, 2.0GHz, 20M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT, 8C, 95W, Max Mem 1600MHz
- Four 16GB RDIMM RAM, 1600MT/s, Low Volt, Dual Rank, x4 Data Width
- Two 300GB 15K RPM SAS 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Hard Drives, RAID1
- Five 600GB 15K RPM SAS 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Hard Drives, RAID5
- 3 years Dell ProSupport, immediate phone, and remote server access, or next business day on-site service
- Dell ProSupport can be extended to 7 years max
... Which will replace the pair of out-of-warranty, 32-bit Dell PowerEdge tower servers we're currently using, and frees up another office in the process.
All-in-all, while we're paying one-time, lump sum, this equates to +/- $650 investment over 36 months, and ends up being +/- half of that even with the additional cost of the 7 years extended warranty/support... If we grow faster than anticipated, it's expandable, and have the option of a plug-in NAS, another in-house, or cloud server for fault tolerance, etc. down the road.
We're also upgrading to a Dell PowerConnect 2848 (
48 port) Gigabit switch, and maintaining our nightly backup using the 2TB external USB drives we already have for the time being; as NAS is not cost effective enough to justify replacing/reallocating said external drives at this time.
In turn, once the migrations are complete, I'm debating installing the hardware key ICPR licenses we currently use on even more out-dated Dell Dimensions (
former workstations I've since replaced), to either the new workstations we have, or the soon to be available PowerEdge tower servers for the better processing speed, bus, etc. and add them back to the domain as 'library' computers that our engineers remote into from their ICPR calculations... I want to test one in each configuration to see how bad of an impact on their daily work it would in fact be.
Separately, you may want to skip Symantec's newest backup software, as the network side doesn't run on 2013, only 2010; which is ironic as the client side does run on newest... Supposedly they're working to correct that. Instead, we're just going to renew our existing backup software, which has not presented any issues to date.
We're also upgrading to MS Office 365 Midsize Business; Right now each per user, per month fee is reduced through Dell for less than what MS Lync is alone, and it provides all Office Professional applications on up to five devices per user (
i.e., work, home, mobile, etc.), intranet space, a client facing website (
if you don't already have one), web-based email (
again, if you don't already have an exchange server), as well as plenty of OneDrive space for document sharing, etc. with clients in lieu of, or in addition to your FTP server.
Cheers