Moving to a Client/Server Enviroment

James Senior, Partner Technology Specialist James works in the Solutions Partners team in Microsoft UK, currently specialising in training and readiness for partners selling and supporting Small Business Server. James’ blog is at http://blogs.technet.com/james/.

Question: We are a start-up company involved in hotel management and consultancy. We need to install a client/server environment which will initially service the needs of 10 users, and up to 30 by end of 2009. The clients will be a mixture of desktops and laptops with the addition of 4 printers and 1 fax machine. Our main applications will be Microsoft Office, email, MSProject, Blackberry Enterprise Server, and Visio.

We propose to use SBS 2003 with Exchange on one server and BES on a high spec PC and have been advised to purchase a third server to act as a print/fax server and Backup Domain Controller.

Given that there is a budget to comply with, would you view the third server as superfluous to our needs at this point, or would you view it as a wise investment in light of our immediate and future growth. Is it necessary in order to ensure Active Directory integrity in the aftermath of a controller crash? - Mike, Berkshire

Answer: Hi Mike, firstly, congratulations on moving to a client/server environment- it’s an essential step for a company with your growth plans. Small Business Server 2003 is very much a business workhorse, and will comfortably meet your expansion needs.

For a small number of users (e.g. 5), many companies get by without a server- it’s perfectly possible to connect computers to a network without a server (this is called a peer-to-peer network).

However, due to the expense, many companies live with a peer-to-peer network for much longer than they should.

Why companies move to a server environment

 Problems can be solved remotely,... a policy-driven IT architecture reduces the incidence of problems in the first place. 

Usually, the business reasons for upgrading to a client/server architecture are:

Technically the security, maintenance and management functions of a server also represent a great improvement over peer-to-peer networks.

All of this can be managed easily without complicated manual intervention. You don’t mention in your question whether you have an IT partner for your business, but your need for support should heavily reduced with a server and the expense should be similarly reduced too. Problems can be solved remotely, and, in any case, a policy-driven IT architecture reduces the incidence of problems in the first place.

Our point here is that, whilst Exchange, Blackberry Server and lots of other software goodies are your reasons for becoming server-based, the financial benefits to your business also stem from technical efficiencies.

Keeping Active Directory available

So what about the third server? Well, technically you don’t need the additional server for printing and faxing. Printing and faxing, in today’s high-throughput IT systems, put relatively little pressure on a server. As you have four printers, this reduces the load yet further.

However, you have rightly identified that a backup Active Directory (AD) domain controller is a wise investment. AD does not have to be backed up to a server. But an (ideally identical) server with a fully working backup of Active Directory can represent the difference between a few minutes of downtime and a couple of days; if the original AD architecture is lost.

Active Directory is designed to centrally control access and security rights across the network. Instead of adding new users, changing access rights and other administrative functions “by hand”, Active Directory allows easily-defined policies to be applied to individuals, groups of users, items of hardware and locations. That means you can decide, for example, how managers can have greater freedoms than staff lower down the management tree, or what access users logging on from home should be allowed.

Active Directory handles all your policy-based access rights, and is therefore pivotal to a secure, stable and easy-to-use server environment. The question, then, is whether several hours of downtime be worth more to you than the cost of an additional fully-configured server. In a company of your size, with ambitious growth plans, the answer could well be ‘yes’. The cost of the server could be a small price to pay for rapid disaster recovery. Whether you choose to use a backup server or simply back up AD to a local drive, the technical instructions can be found below.

Make big savings by moving to Windows Mobile

However, if you really want to eliminate a server completely, the best opportunity to save money by far is to move from Blackberry mobile phones to one of the wide selection of phones which run on the Windows Mobile platform. You will have already paid for Windows Mobile integration with Exchange by running Exchange on your SBS server, so an investment in the Blackberry server can be superfluous. Of course, such a move would mean new mobile phones for everyone. That’s true. However:

There are some links below which should be useful is you want to learn more.

And finally…

For in-depth advice, you should definitely chat to some IT partners: your question suggests that you have done plenty of planning for the future, and this will help an IT specialist to give you a more precise and informed choice.

--James

Related Links

Learn more about Small Business Server 2003

Windows mobile devices

Step for backing up and recovering AD DS