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Blade Servers for SMBs

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by cg it

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Earlier this year I was approached by a SMB to do some AD design and documentation for an existing system. There was an onsite network admin/CIO but no one else to help manage and maintain the network. During the intital interview and discussion about their needs, the CIO brought up their recent acquisition. A 6 blade HP blade server. About $25,000.00 to $30,000.00 USD . This is for a SMB that has a total of 50 workstations with a SQL DB, exchange server and a DC with DNS. Now the most users I've seen active at any one time was about 30 and they were all using a proprietary application for the db. System performance wasn't bad. Not lighting fast and users weren't waiting around for data but the servers were getting on in their lives [5+ years].

I though getting a 6 blade HP Blade server to replace 4 tower servers at $25/$30k USD a bit expensive. I told the guy he should have spent his money upgrading consumer level product switches and routers and updated the towers where needed [if the db server was taxed or users had to wait for logins].

What do you guys think about a 4 blade blade server costing $30k going into a SMB environment with about 30 active users where the existing servers meet demand but are the equipment is aging?

Money well spent? or wasted capital???

5 replies

by joshua.mesilane

for 30k. They could go out and buy 6 HP GL380 Dual Quad-Core servers with .5TB of storage in them, and that would be overkill for a few small applications, an AD and exchange.

by jaqui

unless there is a merger in the works where the system will suddenly become 50 times larger. [ for example ]
They would have been far better off to upgrade the tower servers as needed to handle workload / replace dying systems and upgrade the network infrastructure as you suggested.

by jaqui

I'm the type of person who will keep an older system running until it dies completely, so I only upgrade hardware when it's absolutely needed.

by rkuhn040172

We have probably 100 users, 2 websites, a portal, intranet, Exchange, AD, DNS, DHCP, SQL, Project server, Sharepoint, Reporting Services, custom ERP app, sales web app, two Citrix servers, manage handhelds, etc.

All that on 14 servers. Much cheaper and I think I could start consolidating that down to 10 or less.

No need for blades here.

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