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I was reading up about the new Dell servers that have been launched with the Small businesses in mind, and I fully support the concept from Dell and their competitors. I’ve summarized the announcements below per product with the Dell comment from their release about each product:

The PowerEdge T110 is a customer inspired first server for small businesses, with a desktop sized chassis and the right combination of security, basic systems management for easy system monitoring and reliability.

The PowerEdge R210 is an ideal first rack server for a small business with space constraints or can be used as a specialized application server for larger corporations. Because of its small 15.5 inch chassis depth and its low wattage power supply, the PowerEdge R210 has the smallest energy footprint of any Dell PowerEdge server.

The PowerEdge R510 is an ideal 2U rack server for mid-sized business and remote offices that require an excellent balance of internal storage, redundancy and value in compact chassis.

The PowerEdge T310 offers growing businesses a tower server complete with optional advanced systems management capabilities including remote management, full redundancy and cost effective RAID options that help to prevent data loss by further protecting the way your data is stored on your internal hard drives.

The Dell PowerVault NX300 is an entry-level Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2008 NAS solution that offers the capability to store up to 4 terabytes of data in a single device while offering the flexibility to deploy additional NX300 arrays as storage needs grow. The NX300 includes Single-Instant Storage deduplication technology to maximize capacity and an intuitive management interface to help deploy quickly and make ongoing management more efficient.

I didn’t ask colleagues what they thought of them, I remember the response when I asked them about I think it was a HP Proliant DL120 G5 some time ago and it’s then that you realise the ‘different worlds’ people live in.

 The questions I got asked about HP’s entry level server:

• What lights out capability does it have?
• What CPUs does it have and how many cores?
• What array controller does it use, and the storage support, obviously it has SAS right?
• How many memory slots does it have and what speed is the memory?
• How many PCI slots does it have?
• Does it support redundant power supplies?

They’re all relevant questions, they really are, but they’re not if you see what I mean?

The questions are completely wrong for that server and that target market, they’re not at the right level and the kind of questions that will be asked, and I’ll explain why they’re wrong.

My colleagues live in an industrial strength always available world with standards where a design team have built the Windows architecture, where there is a team dedicated to testing and validating configurations for servers, where an entry level server might typically not be entertained, because it’s “not fast enough, not enough pci slots for SAN, or memory support”. But that’s fine, in their world, they’re concerned with redundancy, with performance and remote systems management, buying a server at the low end of the market other than the odd one of for a specific need would not occur to them, in any case, with a volume enterprise agreement the difference in price between an entry level and a bank standard system might not be that large, particularly if you consider the “not supported issue”, “we don’t do DL160′s, we do DL360′s.”

In the small business world life is different. You need specific functions delivered, an intranet or SharePoint server, something to run Exchange, a box that can store your files so that if your pc breaks they’re safe. That box, that Exchange server might be just a pc, it might just be Janet’s old pc with Windows XP or Windows Server 2000/Linux which has been reclaimed to fulfil that purpose.

With that in mind, the more accessible we can make the technology in terms of price and functionality the more we can onboard, (bring in) new users to servers as a platform. Even if it’s one server just running the company SharePoint, that we have another business ‘connected’ if you like is the first step towards virtualization or grid, towards scaling out their IT to meet their business needs. The small business/start-up can so easily become the next developing medium business, with that in mind, as the enterprises close shop, move towards virtualization and cloud computing, its the small/medium businesses that still have requirements that can create not only opportunities for the big vendors, but service providers, developers and equally other small/medium businesses themselves.

Could we have the welcome to servering community?

May the competition and the innovation in the entry level server market continue, but at the same time, can we also consider offering these teams, these businesses the foundation skills and best practice not only to empower themselves, but to reduce our support costs, our chances of a phone call at 3 in the morning asking what will happen if I swap a failed drive in my server?

I just remember the first time I got presented with a Compaq Proliant 1850R at a small start-up and got told “Install NT4 on it please”. I didn’t know what an array controller was, what SmartStart or what setup steps I needed to take, about driver packs and SNMP. If it hadn’t been documented by the techy working for that start-up I would have taken ages and possibly set the server up incorrectly in the long term.

With that in mind could we examine the idea even on a per vendor basis?

How wicked would it be if I went http://T110.dell.com/support and have the how to’s, the configurations for SharePoint with demos/downloadable guides etc over and above the generic support documents? To have real T110 users commenting on the server, how they set it up and used it? What to watch out for etc? Have engineers/sales or design guys saying, so you’ve got a T110 and you need an exchange server, check out this configuration or maybe scale up to a T310 because….

Or have:

Welcome to HP, to your first DL160 G5, this is how you do… this is what configuration we recommend for, these are the basic setup tips in SmartStart, in Windows, to configure this is what you need. But all in a format that’s subscribable, readable and not in those ‘for release’ official support/installation guides, those never reach your core target market, they reach the technologists, the IT guys, but they don’t reach the guy that’s thinking, “Dell/HP, Lenovo/Dell, actually I’ll go Acer”.

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