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Small Business and Redundancy

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by clearsmashdrop 2 views

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I was working with a friend to build a server for email and file sharing for a small business and at work I often get calls from small business owners. Sometimes they are just one hard drive crash away from being totally down for the day.

This brings up a question Ive been thinking about. How much reduncancy should a small business have, and when are you moving to overkill. I realize sometimes small business have very little in the way of budgets. But at least the primary file server should be a mirror set.

What is your experience working with small business'? If they have a file server do you recommend Raid of some sort? Do you recommend they back up to off site tapes, or just a second box. Im curious.

For me, the min I would expect (assuming they have 1 server that does it all) I would RAID 1 the Operating system and Raid 1 the Data files. Im talking IDE Raid. That protects the data, but wont do anything for power supply failures. But you get the idea.

3 replies

by areets

As a consultant, I had at least 3 customers with a total spread of 5 to 15 servers (excluding PCs) of various performant power. Since moving between these clients was not easy, I frameworked support tools that offered constant daily proactive monitoring. The budgets did bare, so all I could do was to ensure that down-time was minimized but the customer was fully aware of what the budget did attain.

I always provided alternative options with the recommendated one so as the infrastructure was clear from the out start.

Those with the budget got the extra service, a RAID system and power backup.

TSP

by clearsmashdrop

I like how you set the expectation of what a certain budget provides. That is very good.

I try to stress that your most critical server, should not be on a single point of failure, unless you can live with it being down for a day or two until a replacement is ordered and replaced.

I took a call from a small business owner who did all his work on a NAS box. He never made any backups, never understood that hard drives fail, etc. So when his hard drive died, he was down until he could getthe data recoverd. (which would take about a week) Well, he was out 3-4 thousand dollars in revenue. A second back up box, would have cost 500.

by djent

I would prefer a good quality SCSI and backup to IDE RAID. Backup is redundant, RAID is transient and IDE is low quality with poor fault tolerance. SATA will improve fault tolerance but not equal SCSI. There is no substitute for a good backup plan and no recovery from a fire that melts your RAID system.

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