Fault tolerant server structure for the smallest of businesses
First of all, SCE is overkill for 5-6 desktop machines. WSUS is probably a better option and is free.
You haven't said much about what exactly has failed. Was it a part in the machine? Is this a dusty environment? My primary support environment is approximately 40 users with approximately 10 servers (not including virtualized). We buy Dell machines (Optiplex's) and we have had maybe 4 hardware failures in the last 5 years on ALL of that stuff. So what you're seeing on the workstations, isn't normal.
Do they have a proper server room/location for the server (with cooling and not a lot of dust, at least?)
Raid-5 with hot swap is an inexpensive way to go on this server and provides some protection against hard drive failure. I would also add in redundant power supplies (inexpensive) and a UPS.
- Server class hardware
- Raid on hard drives (edited to add)Having a hot spare available is probably overkill, since most drives under warranty can be overnighted. With 3 drives in a raid-5 for instance, you can lose one drive and be okay until the new one arrives. Lose >1 drive however, you're screwed no matter how you look at it.
- redundant power supplies
- Proper warranty (with Dell for instance we get next-business-day and keep your hard drive because we can live with a day of downtime on any of our servers.)
- Backup solution
Failover clustering? You are starting to enter a realm that is both costly and complex for such a small environment. Remember that in such a small environment, while uptime is important, it's also important to remember that you'll want to keep things as simple as possible.
As for the workstations, address the problem (which you haven't been extremely clear about). Perhaps you could purchase an "extra" workstation that has your base image on it, that just sits there taking all of your updates from WSUS that you could use as a swap out machine if one of their workstations dies (which is what we do). We also have a shitload of parts that we can swap to replace the most common parts that die (power supplies, ram, hard drives) until the warranty part arrives.
Backups. No amount of redundancy is a substitute for good backups. You have numerous options here. With such a small environment you could look at many (Mozy, Carbonite come to mind) over-the-wire solutions which take care of offsite and automated at the same time for a reasonable cost. You could also put in a tape solution and use a service like Iron Mountain to vault the tapes off-site. Whatever you do, do not take tapes home with you! especially if they have valuable information on them (SS#, etc.)
From my experience, SBS has its own set of problems. Especially if you set it up clustered etc. The effort in maintenance is way too big for such a small shop.
Set up a proper little server, 4 disks, raid (5 | 10 | 6), pci-e raid controller, a basic fileserver, ups (thanks tomtom).
Mail for just a few people is probably best handled by an external provider.
Stay away from SCE and similar overkill situations, since you would have to have VPN, Active Directory, and similar. Setting all this up is a major effort, and perhaps not in the best interest of your customer.
By guiding your small customer to a simple, yet efficient and reliable solution, you will make them and yourself happy.
Teach them to look into eventlogs, maybe give them a simple script that checks for disk warnings. Visit them regularly, if they want that, and check the logs for them. Deal with the problems one at a time.
This is not a hardware issue primarily. Get a USV - NOW. One that is ON LINE (I.e. filters the electicity).
On top of that, and I'm not embellishing this, they have seen four hardware failures this year to date
This is eihther comical - VERY rare - or based on for example fluctuating power or something th eserver did not handle that good. This is NOT normal, and the chance of that happening "just" is EXTREMELY low. Like lottery winning low. I have seen similar behavior - but based on either CRAP power supplies or... on unstable power supplies with spikes, partially home inducted (seen servers die when you turn on the lights thanks to a very bad switch where you could see sparks).
- SCE is not needed. WSUS is enough.
- SBS does not really support what you need in uptime - but you could try running it on a virtualization platform. It DOES run in Hyper-V... I know people doing that for demo purposes.
Just some additional insights:
- Use RAID-6 instead of RAID-5+hot-spare. With RAID-6 the parity is doubled across the disks, so you can have 2 disks failing at the same time. Or just use RAID-5, and have working DR backups
- First focus on having redundancy INSIDE the server box (disks, power supply, cooling)
- Buy some premium support service for the server box, with a response time SLA for hardware failure (it's much cheaper than a cluster solution)
- Buy some (good) on-line UPS
- Implement some availability solution based on replication, like DoubleTake Availability. There's a version of DoubleTake Availability tailored for Windows SBS wich is very inexpensive. You will need 2 servers to do that, but your downtime in case of hardware failure will decrease to less than 10 minutes