Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

Servers for small businesses are never purchased according to need, but according to budget. This is a (sad) reality, that can’t be changed on a technical level. Most small businesses don’t have the amount of resources necessary to purchase an IT infrastructure according to their needs.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a service provider, or if you are the one that has the internal IT as a side job in a small business, the main target is still to get an infrastructure which doesn’t create troubles. Even small businesses depend on their it infrastructure – while a bank like the UBS would probably be dead in the water if their infrastructure is down for a day, it isn’t that bad for a small business. But without an infrastructure, they will still get problems, missed deadlines, and missed business.

There are multiple ways to make infrastructure more resilient to problems, usually a combination of these methods is used:

• Application redundancy
  Application redundancy has many names – clustering, replication, you name it. The trick is here that software and data can be spread throughout multiple machines. This makes it possible to provide high reliability with cheap hardware. The problem here is that application redundancy is usually expensive (with commercial software), support for it might not exist for SMB software, and that it increases administrative overhead.
• Hardware redundancy
  Almost every piece of hardware can be implemented to be redundant. The most common form of hardware redundancy is RAID – usually implemented in even the cheapest servers. Hardware redundancy is not a fix for software problems, and it can’t save you from every disaster. The plus side is that it usually is completely abstracted from the end user, and thus only costs money.
• Backups
  Backups exist in many forms. They range from simple solutions like a single tape drive, which stores full copies of the complete server to a single tape, which can be stored off site. Another form of backups are volume snap shots, called “Shadow copies” in the windows world. The aren’t suited for disaster recovery, but allow easy recovery of data deleted by end users.

I will write about each of these topic in the coming week, and how to use them in a small business.