Small Business Server

The Microsoft Small Business Server is exactly what its name would suggest: a server for small businesses. Companies that can’t afford more expensive and specialized solutions will find that the Small Business Server can more than provide for their basic needs. It has every critical application that you would expect a business server to have: Exchange, SQL, File Server and much more.

Nowadays small businesses are increasing in productivity much more rapidly than they were a few years back. It is with this in mind that Microsoft is building the SBS latest editions. Small business servers have become a necessity for every small business out there that is trying to stay competitive it its market. The advantage that the Microsoft SBS brings to those who can’t afford more is that it simply lifts them off the ground and points them in the right direction.

The SBS features have been continuously improving over each new version coming out. The SBS ‘Essentials’ is quite promising for smaller businesses that do not need the administrative overhead of managing and maintaining backups.

However, although the Microsoft Small Business Server offers quite a lot of value for its price, you still need to keep in mind that there are also risks involved with adopting this economic solution. Should there be an issue with the server, you are at the risk of not having any redundancy or guarantee of no downtime.

So before you are going to purchase the Microsoft Small Business server you should first weigh in all the pros and cons and make an informed decision. If server uptime is critical to your business then you may want to go with another solution, a multi-server one. However, if you have a small business looking to get pointed in the right direction then you should definitely consider Microsoft’s Small Business Server.

You can check out Server Room’s Small Business Server offers by going to: http://www.serverroom.us/small-business-server

Larger companies have many servers that have different technical roles. For the sake of an example let’s pretend “some big company” has larger companies such as fortune 500 or fortune 100 companies have many servers that do different things. Examples are:

Multiple Domain controllers / file sharing role Multiple SQL / databases Multiple Exchange servers And so forth…

Let’s pretend that this organization has 50 servers and each one has its own role to do something specific for the computer network. In theory this would mean that this company has 50 separate physical nodes setup in a computer room to control the computers for this company. In today’s world this would be consolidated using computer virtualization but that is getting off topic so I’m not going to get into that in this article and will discuss virtualization in another article later on.

Now let’s pretend you are a small business owner and you need to share files, share a database and share calendars or whatever other roles you may want or need.

This means you would have 3 physical servers and 3 different server operating systems.

Now with a Microsoft Small Business Server Operating System you get 1 computer server that has multiple roles built into 1 nice neat package. So you can have that file server and that database server and an exchange server all combined into 1 neat little package. This saves the small business owner money.

Microsoft states the SBS – small business server will support up to 75 computer users / workstation computers. In theory it will but in the real world if you have 75 computers connected to a SBS server you can expect very poor performance.

From my experience I will say that Microsoft SBS servers are pretty cool IF they are properly configured with the right hardware and software. I have seen many small businesses have an SBS server that were NEVER configured correctly or are just being used as a simple file server. In such a case the SBS server isn’t necessary and is a waste of money for the business owner.

So without getting into technical details this concludes what a Microsoft Small Business Server does. You can check our Small Business Server offers by going to: http://www.serverroom.us/small-business-server

Author : Lucian Paun

Why use a Microsoft Small Business Server?

Unlike large companies that have complicated network systems and many servers performing individual tasks, small businesses usually rely on whatever they can get for the least amount of investment they can get away with. They may also rely on open source software and while these options will perform well for what they are worth, problems will inevitably appear and even the most skilled technicians will need help in trying to fix them and needless to say that support for these options is pretty scarce and usually hard to find.

With the Microsoft Small Business Server you get one computer server which has multiple roles built into one package. This server works like a large network of computers would but at a much lower scale. You can have the same computer performing all the required tasks thus saving your business a lot of money.

For the Microsoft Small Business Server to work optimally you will need to set it up correctly and install the right software. Many small businesses nowadays make the mistake of not setting up their servers the right way and end up using their Microsoft Small Business Server as a simple file server instead of using it for its full potential.

If you are interested in getting a Microsoft Small Business Server for your business then you may want to check out Server Room’s offer first.