Getting rid of your server in a small business environment

In a small business environment, is it still necessary to have a central server?

Speaking for my own company (a small charity with about 12 employees) we use our server (Windows Server 2003) for the following:

• Email via Microsoft Exchange
• Central storage
• Acting as a print server
• User authentication / Active Directory

There are significant costs associated with running a server like this:

• Electricity, first for the server itself then for the air conditioning required (this thing pumps out a lot of heat)
• Noise (of which there is a lot)
• IT support bills (both Windows Server and Exchange are pretty complicated, and there are many ways they can go wrong)

I've found ways to replace many of these functions with cheaper (better?) alternatives:

• Google Apps / GMail is a clear win for us: we have so many spam related problems it's not even funny, and Outlook is dog slow on our aging computers
• You can buy networked storage devices with built in print servers, such as the Netgear ReadyNAS™ RND4210 that would allow us to store/share all of our documents, and allow us to access printers over the network

The only thing that I can't figure out how to do away with is the authentication side of things - it seems to me that if we got rid of our server, you'd essentially have a bunch of independent PCs that had no shared pool of user accounts / no central administrator. Is that right? Does that matter? Am I missing any other good reasons to keep a central server?

Does anybody know of any good, cost-effective ways of achieving the same end but without the expensive central server?

Solution 1:

We keep a server in our office for the reasons you stated, primarily for centralized authentication and managing access to shared resources (storage, printers, etc.). We used to run Exchange as well and moved our e-mail to another mail system for the same reasons you stated as well (Exchange was just a pain to manage for such a small group of users). As for the other concerns with electricity and noise, I would recommend downgrading your server. If the one server is generating sufficient heat and noise as to require its own A/C unit, then it's time to get something smaller and quieter. DELL produces some decent low-end tower servers which are very quiet and do not pump out a lot of heat which are made for use in offices and will run Windows Server for a small workgroup without any trouble.

Solution 2:

Just because you have a server doesn't mean it has to be some expensive, powerful beast of a machine. You can just as easily use a workstation or common desktop for the Domain, file and print sharing. However you do need to consider backups as they are one of the things often lost if you drop down to some type of NAS/print server.

Also I completely agree that running exchange yourself for a small business is probably an unnecesary complication. GMail is OK to a point, but if you do need more functionality you can get online managed exchange services.

Solution 3:

Back 3 years ago, when we moved everything to the cloud in our school, it became apparent that a small company does not need a server. We have a bunch of computers and the only thing they need to share is a printer.

The fact is that MS sold us the idea that one needs a server, and it may have been true in the past before the cloud was a winner. Today we run our docs and email services on Google for free. If our school burns, we can go and work next door or next city without losing one bite of information.

Next January we are launching a new school. The question of the server is out once more in the planning.

It's cheaper to administrate a bunch of user accounts in multiple PCs than to administrate a server, not forgetting the expertise requiered and the multiple issues associated with running one.

I give all this advice, coming from an MS "expert" with a long tradition of managing server environments in extremely complex networks. Now that I look at our network from a business perspective, running a server in an SMB environment is totally overkill.

Save yourselves the money.

The main teaching here is that one needs to grow and adapt. We will happy to run our new network with no servers attached.

Diego Bronstein Partner at Wizard Colombia wizardcolombia.com