Hi guys, looking for a server wth onsite support for a small business in Melbourne. The prices I've been quoted are very high, over double the price of the hardware from a company like Dell. The business only operates during normal business hours, but on site support is essential, do larger companies like Dell offer on site support or am I stuck with paying huge premiums to small businesses? Building the hardware myself from MSY is not a problem, but when I'm not on site, others may need technical assistance. Can anyone give any recommendations? I don't mind paying but when you are looking at a $2000 system and are receiving quotes close to $5k, it's a bit ridiculous.
Computer server with onsite support for small business
[Deactivated] on 27/07/2016 - 17:49
Comments
Onsite warranty.
Depending on what you've been quoted, you might be overlooking a few costly items.
The hardware might be $2000, but have you looked at the price of MS Server + CALs? The server itself will need to be assembled, RAID set up, Server software installed, drivers, configuration of server (what services are required for installation/configuration), user accounts created, exchange user accounts created, sql user accounts created, etc etc.
Places like MSY can be cheaper than wholesalers. These companies may have accounts with wholesalers where they themselves may not be getting the best price. (I don't believe MSY does any server cases/intel server boards etc.)
Things like server cases cost a significant amount more than standard cases (hotswappable psu/software controlled fans etc). So you'll need to price like for like, as it may not be a $2000 system.
They also may be including in the price possible labour for phone/remote support to assist the company to find things like mapped network drives, new OS etc. It's amazing how many random questions you can get after a server install.
They may be charging a premium as they know exactly what/how things need to be set up, saving you time in the future.
Ask them what their hourly labour rate is. You might find it's $150ph, and there's 10 hours worth of work before you get to see the system. If you're getting the server installed, you might find that there are two technicians @ $150ph, so you're paying $300ph.
They could also be blindly ripping you off.
This may not be of any help, but may give some insight to the price (or atleast to ask the company some questions).
What is it you need the server for? Can you fulfil those needs with cloud services, e.g. email, storage, etc? Would save you having to worry about hardware.
Just about privacy and speed.
Its for a medical practice running practice management software. It's not really a server, its just an i7 PC.
Can it be done with a dedicated server in a server farm and some relatively dumb and easily replaceable PCs?
No, it needs to be an onsite server. It is simply to run onsite software, and share information to PCs across the building (details/results/appointments etc).
@thorton82: Ok, how about installing the software on a NAS with RAID, which will offer easy repair if a disk dies. Buy a spare standby NAS if you are concerned the NAS might die. Export the share and execute the software on standard easy to source PCs.
@thorton82: But the problem with simple hardware is that if it dies, it needs complex attention. By adding redundancy a person with a little training can fix the problem and carry on, at least until someone can look at the problem during working hours.
what medical software, Medical director or genie? I look after both and I fix most software problem via remote access. Anything I can't fix I will ask the software supplier to help. You don't really need on-site warranty just get good PSU, Asus motherboards and SSD. All my hardware lasted more than 5 years.
Why not move to Dropbox, outlook exchange etc, our business has never looked backed since dropping our server.
Its running specific medical practice software
its not very strange for medical practices to spend the $5k mark for a proper server & licenses!… Even though they would be just commonly running Medical Director/Pracsoft, MYOB, etc. They'll also have to contend with Security Suites & Proper Backups to pass the accreditation.
Sounds like you should make the move to cloud based medical practice software with a new or upgraded server needed. A new server will not be without its initial teething problems and I would weigh this up with learning a new system over the benefits of reduced IT infrastructure and support costs.
Cloud is not feasible, the internet connection is woeful.
I am gathering you haven't got a single clue on the costings involved? server hardware/ups/backups/software/licensing/support and you've been assigned to seek for a solution for this small business? Why not start by telling us exactly what the requirements are rather than spitting out ridiculous comments of incompetence.
Say one of the quotation given to you properly fulfills the requirement, the business isn't being ripped off and is being offered by a competent provider… then what are your reasons for the above?
Are you even aware that these are all fully tax deductible (up to $20k currently) for the small business owners?
There is no need to be rude about it guy.
Its essentially a basic network PC, running practice management software. It is networked to other PCs. It just needs to be a reliable PC. It serves data to other networked PCs, but doesn't need to be particularly powerful. The pressing need is for on site support. The current proposal is for an i7 PC, 500gb SSD, and transfer of information from existing PC to new PC. It probably doesn't need to be an i7, but at least it is future proofing. Speccing up a PC on centrecom for example (with a gold powersupply, and an additional 3TB red HDD) came to $1400. The proposal was for $4600. This included onsite support (but someone like Dell for example), provide 4hr onsite support, for $800 for a period of 5 years.
I don't see what the tax deduction has to do with anything, the PC was deductible regardless of the $20k.
Basically, what I am asking is does anyone know of any companies that offer onsite support for small businesses, at a reasonable price when purchasing hardware from them?
Where did you get that figure for Dells Onsite. I worked for UNISYS for 10 years.. Now in a gov IT role.
Priced up a PC, looked at their 4hr support options in final pricing.
i see you are looking at PC's NOT servers. I used to service Poweredge servers being Dells Onsite Engineers from Unisys. I believe the Onsite Support you are seeking is different from the onsite support that comes with dell equipment. You'll be probably be scared if I mentioned that renewing an R720 server prosupport next day onsite costs approx $2.5k for a year.
Anyway sorry I butted into your Thread. I didn't realise you were just after PC's to solve your clients IT business requirements.
@j03: Yeah it is just a PC, its not NASA, its not crunching big numbers. And there are no clients. Why would there be a middle man to a middle man?
@thorton82: FYI, typical server hardware isn't more powerful than consumer hardware. Often it's actually weaker, especially if you're judging by price.
What you get with server hardware is:
- Better reliability, usually with lots of built-in redundancy
- This includes things like ECC RAM to detect memory corruption - otherwise you risk random data changes without ever knowing!
- Also includes enterprise-grade drives (usually SAS) that perform better in RAID - consumer drives in RAID have a nasty habit of getting stuck in a retry loop on read error.
- Easier maintenance, especially without bringing down the machine.
- Monitoring and management, often baked into the motherboard firmware. Also typically includes a BMC (IPMI) for remote management even when the OS has crashed or the machine is powered off.
This has absolutely nothing to do with being a "nuclear silo". This is bog-standard server hardware.
Oh, sure, you can bet against consumer hardware not failing. But in the event of a failure you've probably lost at a minimum several hours of productivity - and if your backups aren't properly up to date, possibly days/weeks/months of data. Try explaining to the ATO that you can't file taxes because you lost all your data.
(That's not to say servers can't fail, but that's significantly less likely.)
- Better reliability, usually with lots of built-in redundancy
The $20k is an instant write off that involves no depreciation. You really should know that.
https://www.ato.gov.au/General/New-legislation/In-detail/Dir…
Rephrase! Don't muck around! A Cheap as chips solutions isn't called for in this situation. If the business was running HCN's Medical Director/Pracsoft solutions and decided to seek advice from one of their "Integration & IT Partners" they will be given a proper solution. Maybe you should reach out to them for quotes.
Yes I remember backup tapes we used to have, remote support access card for the server and a UPS, glad that is behind us.
As others have mentioned, what practice management program is it? Medical Director, Best Practice… Genie?
Servers usually cost more than 5k. Probably closer to 10k mark. I don't believe you can build a PC to be as reliable and resilient like a server. Dual power supplies and RAID are what you would want. Also invest in a UPS so you can cleanly shutdown if there's a long power outage.
It's not a nuclear silo, a standard PC has been fine for the last half decade, a new one will be fine the another 5 years.
People are suggesting a more reliability focused machine, not a power house.
Like how cool would it be for you to be able to turn on the PC remotely and check for boot problems? Or have the machine proactively warn you of an impeding disk failure - and automatically send the alert to the vendor so they can ship out a new hard disk, at 3am? So that you can pull a lever on the front and swap it out when you get into the office in the morning, without any shut-down or data loss (or expertise)?
Of course it all costs money, and you need to weigh the costs and benefits.
At the very least you need to be thinking about backup and your plan B..
At one of my old jobs we had to maintain a PC acting as a server. It was running a core business function that was generating income. It was critical to be up. It was generating thousands of dollars per hour. We had so many problems with disk on that machine. It was down at least an hour or two every few weeks.
Check with your client how important the data is. If being down is going to lose them money then you should go for a server. If they can afford downtime and restoring from backups by all means use a PC - but at least buy a UPS.
Servers usually cost more than 5k. Probably closer to 10k mark
Cheap ones do :D
Make sure you're comparing apples to apples..
Dell will replace a broken part, but fixing your system will be up to you.
The local shop will likely take a more involved approach..
At three times the price
What can anyone say? You know their price, and you have an opportunity to vote with your wallet.
Check out the HP Microserver. They are not i7 (by any means) but you can (retrofit) a XEON. They use ECC RAM and you'll probably need to replace the 2GB with more, depending on the base OS you want to run. It will run a bunch of Linux OS's, Windows etc. You can buy licences for remote admin etc. It'll fit 4 3.5" HDDs, but the (onboard) RAID is limited to 0, 1. With a couple of 3 TB HDS it should'nt cost more than $1000 in base config. If you buy licences, buy from HP networking dealer (not HP - they are more expensive).
They are a solid little (literally) machine and are cheaper than Dell, worth a look.I would never recommend building your own pc for a server or even a whitebox for a business.
I dont want to take responsibility for when things go bang. You really only have 3 choices… that's Dell, HP or IBM/Lenovo.
Buy a server from them, even a basic ML10 and get a 3yrs onsite or nbd warranty.
If a HDD goes bang, Dell will send a guy out with a hdd to fix things, why do you want to be the guy in the gunsights for that?
Crazy otherwise.
Make sure your backups are sound too. They will fix your hardware but wont be doing any config or install other than kicking off an OS install or recovery if required.
Look at Cloud based PMS - https://www.medirecords.com
No big upfront cost… Pay month to month subscription based on no. of users… No fixed contract…It has its place.
But i know of many clinics that have accumulated over 500gb of documents/ultrasound/xrays and will continue to grow as they scan and receive more electronic correspondence.
And practices where nbn is not even planned, sharing an adsl2 amongst 10 consulting rooms?
But the biggest hurdle is being able to convince partners to trust their data into the cloud.
and then the internet goes down..
i needed a server for a medical practice with onsite support and redundancy
i bought a dell vrtx with pro onsite labor, parts * support 2 years in a used condition for 2k off ebay.
buying serverware as long as it still has a valid service tag is pretty good
also the optiplex XE/XE2 range also provides similar support I believeSomething self-built for a medical practice? A normal PC they should rely on all their data and their most important software which without it they can't run their practice? Seriously?
And you're calling $5k quotes ridiculous? I'd call that rather cheap.
Besides, $5k is not that much money for a financially healthy medical practice with a decent amount of customers.
Your emails should be in the cloud, look to office 365, emails aren't overly important
I would do this;
- 2 x UPS x 2kva - $350 each from anyware, 3yr warranty
- Install a rack to house the DL380 - doesn't need to be new, can even buy from ebay or gumtree
- Purchase a DL380 G7, you can get these used for about ~$800 from ebay, it will have a dual power supply, run each power supply to each ups
- Setup the iLO so you can view the system on the network so if you need to dial into someones pc, you can see what the server is doing
- Set it up with a RAID 6 configuration with 1 spare, teach someone there to monitor the hard drives for error lights on a weekly basis so they can be replaced, sign up for a hp support contact to cover this device next business day response time which can be sourced for about an odd $600 for the whole year or pay a bit extra and get it with 4 hour response time from HP (24x7x4)
- Install windows server 2012 r2
- Install all updates and service packs
- Install the doctor software according to their specifications
- Implement a scheduled daily backup solution within windows to backup to a USB hard drive that the receptionist can rotate weekly/daily or whoever is monitoring the system with email notifications via scheduled task to make sure its running as intended
- Install the avast paid antivirus and make sure you put the free one on the other computers that should do the trick
All in all, this will cost you about 3-4k but it wont have any headaches
The reason I've suggested the HP DL380 is because its a rigorously tested server designed for high reliability and power outages are going to be your biggest problem, if one UPS fails, no problem, the other one is running and it will keep the server on for at least a few hours.
And don't be such a cheap ass for a medical practice, if your being like this for your equipment, god knows how you are going to treat your patients, or perhaps your being hired by a cheap ass.
When you say onsite support, do you mean server support or onsite warranty? Ie. what are you looking for in addition of the physical server hardware?