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New Office Server vs. Time Capsule

B

bigdaddymac

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 20, 2007
119
0
New York
I work in a small (4 -5 people) office. The office has had a server for years, which needs to be upgraded. Primarily, the folks in the office use the server and their computers for: email, internet, file sharing, accounting, storage. The environment will be both mac and PC users. We have email & exchange accounts with online hosts.

It's time to upgrade the server as it's ancient. I know this will cost a lot, more than we want to budget.

My question is: do we really even need a server? Would time capsule suffice, based on our needs I would rather spend the money upgrading to new computers in the office, new printers, etc. if we can get away with time capsule as our "server". I know TimeCapsule isn't out yet, but, based on the specs and the info above, any feedback would be appreciated.
 
bigdaddymac said:
I work in a small (4 -5 people) office. The office has had a server for years, which needs to be upgraded. Primarily, the folks in the office use the server and their computers for: email, internet, file sharing, accounting, storage. The environment will be both mac and PC users. We have email & exchange accounts with online hosts.

It's time to upgrade the server as it's ancient. I know this will cost a lot, more than we want to budget.

My question is: do we really even need a server? Would time capsule suffice, based on our needs I would rather spend the money upgrading to new computers in the office, new printers, etc. if we can get away with time capsule as our "server". I know TimeCapsule isn't out yet, but, based on the specs and the info above, any feedback would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Not sure if Time Machine will do it but how about a NAS drive? Icy Box make a NAS Enclosure that has all the FTP, Samba, DHCP Server built in, and also has a Print Server built in to use with USB Printers. The enclosure costs about £100 ($190), and then you just need to buy SATA drives to fit it, and can set them up in RAID config.
 
Unless you are going to host your own mail server I would say just get a decent multi drive nas device. Synology/Infrant (netgear now owns them)/Thecus all make good devices I personally have a synology and will later be buying a thecus as a media server.
 
Ha, funny, i'm in the same situation. I gotta replace my server at the office. It's a ticking bomb and we need to act quick. Anyway, you and i both use our servers the same way: email, internet, file sharing, accounting, storage etc. And we have 6 users running on it (all Windows).

I don't know how you're setup at the office but i'll take myself as an example. All of my applications are running on the server. I got an accounting application, i have an inventory/invoice application and i have a backup (tape) application. Apart from that, the server is being used as peer-peer and file share. In the end, i won't be able to use an NAS device (well for the backup only), unless there's a way to run programs on an NAS.

NAS is useful for more than just general centralized storage provided to client computers in environments with large amounts of data. NAS can enable simpler and lower cost systems such as load-balancing and fault-tolerant email and web server systems by providing storage services. The potential emerging market for NAS is the consumer market where there is a large amount of multi-media data. Such consumer market appliances are now commonly available. Unlike their rackmounted counterparts, they are generally packaged in smaller form factors. The price of NAS appliances has plummeted in recent years, offering flexible network-based storage to the home consumer market for little more than the cost of a regular USB or FireWire external hard disk. Many of these home consumer devices are built around ARM, PowerPC or MIPS processors running an embedded Linux operating system. Examples include Buffalo's TeraStation [1] and Linksys NSLU2 [2]. More recently, home NAS devices have incorporated support for the Universal Plug and Play protocol, enabling them to serve the growing number of networked home media players.
Click to expand...
Wiki

...i'm not sure what else to say, i only know so much about servers, only because i have to plop down a big amount for a new one within the next few days.
 
Thanks for the help. I'm now leaning toward this setup below for our 4-5 person office (for our company website, email, internet, drive sharing needs). Any feedback on how this looks, what I'm missing, etc, would be appreciated:

NAS Drive, with other drives attached as needed

Software: Each End user has own software (Word Processing, Mail, etc.) on their own computer.

Email: Set up via an online provider - Probably ExchangeMyMail.com, so that we also get MS Exchange Service, postini, imap, etc.

Website: Our website hosted via an online provider - perhaps .Mac if we're able to create the site with iWeb.

Backup: Not sure here. Is there an online entity that will "back up" our NAS drive daily?

If this works, we would be able to avoid buying a server, and save several thousand dollars, which we can put into buying new computers instead, which is much more fun....
 
i guess u wont have troubles with mail ....

i actually dont understand NAS a lot but i think it does not support advanced sharing settings. I mean it will let all the users access all the shared files. (i think). If you are happy with that, then maybe you can save money.
 
Don't forget backups - you will need to be able to make a regular backup of whatever you have stored on your file server in case of disaster.

I don't know what volume of data you have to deal with, but if backing up to DVD-R is viable, I'd be tempted to pick up a secondhand G4 MDD tower, fill all 4 drive bays with hard drives and configure them as two RAID 1 mirrors - then do periodic backups to either DVD or an external firewire HD that is taken off site when not in use.
 
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