When you put that together with a guy who has started several different businesses including a business focused on small business technology, some people think they have found their “go to guy” when they have a technology question. A good portion of the calls I get from clients have nothing to do with my current business, instead they are related to one of my past businesses. Since this question is a regular one, and not everyone has my number, I thought I would share a little knowledge about Small Business Servers, Windows Home Server and NAS systems. My apologies to those computer support people reading this.
Periodically in business, new computers, printers, fax machines and scanners are part of the game. This week I had the owner of a very small law firm call me about a quote that he got for a new server. His office was working fine, but it was “getting out of date and hard to support.” according to his computer support company. The law firm has 4-5 attorneys at any given time, three legal secretaries, a receptionist and a part time bookkeeper.
This probably sounds like the size of a lot of small businesses, maybe even yours. To make it more challenging, the bookkeeper is part time and uses an Apple Mac. Everyone else has a desktop PC running Win2000 and Wordperfect Legal.
When my client called about another matter, he slipped in an extra question and asked if $15,000 was reasonable for a server, and upgrades to 6 computers. Not new computers, just upgrades. He also wondered why it would take 40 hours to do it. For anyone that has paid someone to upgrade a computer or server, the 40 hours might sound high, but it is very realistic. Even though on the surface it seemed like a reasonable price, I agreed to review the quote and offer my thoughts as his business consultant.
When I got the fax copy of the bid, I noticed it was a bid for just the server and upgrade licenses for each of the workstations. That was it. The server had an auto archiving tape drive and some other nice features but this was a law firm with less than a dozen computers, and all they do is store documents. As I looked at the situation I realized the question really was this: So they need a Server or could they use a NAS?
A NAS is a Network Addressable Storage Device. Think of it like a giant thumb drive the whole office can share. If you are like me and store a ton of music you might have some kind of NAS on your home network. The NAS in my house stores over 10,000 songs that I could access with iTunes since my NAS drive included an iTunes server. Sadly with iTunes 10.5.1, that feature quit working. I don’t know what Apple is thinking, and I hope they fix that soon.
Microsoft has a system called Windows Home Server. It is a NAS type system without all the features at a higher price. I am just going to say, skip Windows Home Server. I sold our test unit for $200 on Craigslist, and I think the guy bought it for the two 2TB hard drives.
The cool thing about a NAS Drive is that everyone in the house can share the pictures, documents, videos and music stored there. Some even have the ability to store TV shows recorded on a TIVO. We hope that iTunes will let us share the music again soon too.
All of these features are great for an office too. For instance, in the law office that called, the attorneys can all share and edit documents without running a thumb drive or CD around the office. It also means that you don’t have to leave computers on to share data. It all gets stored in one place.
Most NAS drives are very simple to set up and can be expanded very easily. My home NAS has 4TB of usable storage, and the office NAS has 6TB of usable storage. At home I built three “virtual drives” on the PC’s. The “I” Drive is each persons own backup space on the NAS, the “M” Drive has “Music”, the “P” Drive has “Photos”, the “S” Drive has “Shared Documents” and the “V” Drive has “Videos”. Pretty simple. With Windows 7 the drives show the full name so M shows up as “M: Music” On my Mac Air it just shows up as an external drive called “Music”.
The office NAS drive for us is quite large because we are building an online video library of courses for an online success class for small business owners. If you don’t store video, you will probably do fine with about 100GB/user in most office settings. We used a similar drive lettering and naming convention for the office computers and it works great. We are all Windows 7 x64 Pro or Mac OS 10.7 or better.
Some NAS drives feature support for Apple’s Time Machine feature. All you need to do is plug the NAS into the Apple Router and set up the Time Machine configuration and you have a huge automatic backup capability. The NAS we have for the office also has remote access capability using dynamic DNS over the internet. Since everyone works from home, this was a key feature.
So if NAS drives do all of these things, why would someone need a server? I can’t think of any reason in a home environment that a server would be needed. In a business there are a couple of things that can trigger the need for a server. The first is e-mail. If you host your own e-mail server, then you need a server. Blackberry Services and MS Exchange both run smoother if you host them in the same building as most of your computers.
For businesses over 25 employees, or with specific needs, hosting your own email might be required. I have only one client that hosts his own e-mail and I can’t figure out why. My guess is because he needed a server for another reason and the support guy just put it on the bid to make more money. Most web hosting packages include at least 25 email boxes. My account includes 500. Why should I deal with a server if they will do it free as part of my web hosting account?
Email isn’t the only reason you might need a server. Quickbooks doesn’t play nice with Windows Home Server (many times called WHS) or NAS drives. Since Quickbooks is the number one small business accounting software, it becomes a consideration. If you have just one person doing all the bookkeeping then you can use a NAS. If you have two people it is a maybe, and three or more you are going to start looking for a server.
In order for more than two or three people use Quickbooks, you need a dedicated computer to host the database file, and a server works better for this. With just two or three people there is a workaround where you can use one persons computer as the Quickbooks server but that computer needs to be a real hot rod if all three people have the same hours. The reality is, the minute you add a second full time user to Quickbooks it is time to consider looking at a Small Business Server.
When you use one persons computer as the server, the other users are using part of that computer to run Quickbooks. That is why they either need a more powerful computer or different hours. In this situation, you just need to create an automatic backup to the NAS drive for your Quickbooks data. It isn’t as clean as using a dedicated computer but it can save several thousand dollars a year in server costs and support costs.
Finally any kind of database program will require a server if you have more than one person using it. Auto shops with two or three computers will have to use a server to host the database are an example. Just about any contractor or professional office with specialized software will need a server. After a closer review of the Law Office, I found that they were running three different legal programs that required a server.
Even if you need a server for your software, you still don’t need to use it for hosting email. If you have less than 50 employees, I would look into moving your e-mail to your web hosting company. It is just one more way to reduce your support costs.
So the question of NAS v. Server in small business really should be a simple decision. Do you have any software that requires a server? If not, the new NAS Drives can save you a lot of money in both hardware and support costs, and I haven’t met a small business owner yet who doesn’t like to save money. What about a server in the cloud you ask? Let’s save that for next time.
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Thank you for your insights.