Compromise – decisions for SMB. Value for money of such decisions.

It’s common that many innovative IT technologies are not affordable for majority of Mongolian SMB companies or small branches due to the fact of high price for IT equipment (even in case of almost zero price for illegally used software). Companies who provide VMS/video management solutions (video servers), companies like Interactive, Navision and other vendors are forced to use Desktop computers as a server for implementations of own products at customer site of small companies who cannot afford to invest too much into hardware immediately. How justified such decisions? Surely all of service providers try at first to suggest professional approach with real Dell servers for DB, application servers and so on, but it’s often declined by customer decision makers.

Let’s discuss how a such decision can be if not aligned to IT best practices, but at least improved to be tolerated:

  • demand or try to convince to buy for a such quasi-servers UPS support with graceful shutdown, it’s regrettable that very few in Mongolia understand importance of it.
  • i would recommend Dell Optiplex. Homegrown, assembled PC is not so reliable. If possible order without discrete video card (enough builtin).
  • from my recent several years experience Microsoft Hyper-V is very reliable and affordable choice (vmware and other vendors hypervisor are too capricious to LAN and storage drivers) for a such small companies (or for small branches of big company). Easy to install PowerChute in windows OS. Easy to backup/replicate. Especially when software price for this in Mongolia always can be zeroed :(. It’s so stunning when i reveal no real backups, DR preparations almost in all Mongolian companies. Usually it’s either manually made backups, manually exported VMs, old style full backups, or SQL backups, and almost these backups are always outdated, useless, never checked.
  • ask/convince customer to place second HDD into a such quasi-server, making mirrored RAID. On other hand it’s common in Mongolia when IT rely only on RAID and considering it’s enough, not doing backups. 🙁
  • almost all existing in Mongolia DB solutions databases for small business never exceeds in size 50-80 gb even for 3-5 years of operations (even without shrinking trans logs). So i would recommend just to buy several  240Gb SSD drives for a such quasi-servers. The performance will be sometimes better than in real Dell server RAID configurations with popular in Mongolia near-line-SATA disks. So the main criteria for a such quasi-servers is plenty of space for extra hard drives. Better certified Dell SATA hdd, or at least after purchase check by hdtune, mhdd these hard drives (SMART errors, surface scan, for seagate disks use SeaTools for Windows)
  • If you plan to save money consolidating servers in Hyper-V environment on a such quasi-server, then buy enough high quality hdd, place not more than 1-2 VMs on each hdd (better on mirrored disk) So the main extra payments is rather affordable purchases of hdd, RAM. Looks like latest i7 CPUs became better than some 2-3 years old Xeons.
  • vPro/AMT full support. If you have activated full KVM support in vPro on a such quasi-server (sometimes there is no price difference :)) then you get remote managebility features (not iDRAC/iLo/RMM features, but better than nothing). At least you can remotely restart, power on/off your quasi-server, or you can with WDS/media mapping remotely restore, repair (ERD iso), re-image your quasi-server.
  • and in the end, if it’s possible and affordable, try to place a such quasi-server, UPS, switch, router and so on into RACK in small server room (the cheapest is of gypsum boards) with at least cheap air conditioner. Size is at least 2×2.5 meter to place RACK and be able to go around it, room door better to place exactly in opposite of RACK door – easier to slide long equipment into RACK.