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Serves you right

by Staff Writers  on Jan 11, 2002
Tags: Serves | you | right
The results of the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics Small Business Survey were released earlier this year, and they contain some interesting facts about IT and small business in Australia. In Ju
The results of the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics Small Business Survey were released earlier this year, and they contain some interesting facts about IT and small business in Australia. In June 2001, there were 1.2 million small businesses across the country and although 67% of them used computers in their daily operations, only half of those had Internet access.

Breaking it down even further, the number of Internet-connected small companies that use email is 44% (or 83% of all Internet-connected business), with 42% using the Internet for research (or 79% of connected business). 18% of businesses had made/received payments or conducted e-commerce transactions on the Web. A staggering 67% of small businesses are home-based (up 26.5% from 97-99), with email usage in these businesses increasing from 26% to 41% and Internet research jumping by 23% to 39% in the same period.

Those are some amazing statistics and if the trend continues, as is expected, its a sure bet that your small-to-medium business may soon outgrow its current IT infrastructure. More PCs, and more connected PCs, place a huge strain on any peer-to-peer network, typically with separate machines controlling different aspects: for instance Bobs PC is connected to the mono-laser printer while Sallys acts as the Internet gateway.

Add more machines and the network quickly gets congested. A small server however, can centralise file sharing, Internet access, email, print and network control, freeing up your machines and the network for the work they were originally intended to do.

WHY BUY A SERVER?

The answer is multifaceted, but breaking it down into core components it can be summed up thusly: reliability, speed and ease of use. Reliable because a server is robust, both in hardware and operating system, faster because a server takes resource hungry functions away from the clients freeing up the network and PCs, and ease of use because it centralises many functions on the one machine. The one hitch is price.

Server technology, both hardware and software, differs from PC technology. As servers are usually critical to a business, they can feature redundancies which can mean doubles of important components to ensure that fail-safes are in place should one component fail. To generalise, a server is just like a PC, but with more. Unfortunately this means that servers are expensive and are usually seen as out of the league of many small to medium businesses, but this is a fallacy. All of the servers weve gathered here are highly affordable.

We asked companies to submit their best small-to-medium business server for under $5,000. This is a cunning price-point, as it is both at the apex of what a small business owner may want to pay for a server, and tricky for the manufacturers to supply without making some sacrifices. The selection of servers we received was quite good considering the limitations.

For starters, Microsofts Server versions of Windows 2000 are extremely expensive (Advanced Server 2000 will set you back around $9,141 dollars), so most of these machines come with Windows 2000 Professional or a version of Linux. Windows2000 is generally easier for the uninitiated to set up, but whereas Linux may be a lot cheaper, it usually requires a system administrator to go along with it a cost many small businesses simply cant afford.

We benchmarked the servers to provide a performance metric, but given that they were reasonably high-powered and more than capable of handling the needs of small businesses, we mainly evaluated them based on features and value for money.

LABS EDITOR: Darren Ellis
CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel Gardiner,
David Kidd and Dave Mitchell
This article appeared in the December, 2002 issue of PC Authority.


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