Business Network Server?

Question

Our business has several locations and we need some type of server/network to connect all the locations. What are the differences between a physical server located in our main office and a virtual server hosted by a some other companies? What are the pro and con for each of the 2 types of server/network? How about security? Will a physical server be more secure than a virtual one? Or vise verse? And the cost? Which is cheaper overall? Thank you very much for your information.

Answer 1

I will address the points one at a time.


1) The main difference between your own server in your main office and a hosting company is who maintains it.

Do you have someone at your office who knows how to set up and maintain your network? If not expect to pay between $75-90K/yr for a good network admin, more if you choose to go with a Unix/Linux box. Also don't forget the cost of the hardware. A high end server will easily cost $4-5000. This doesn't include the cost of running your network drops/routers/switches/etc if the infrastructure is not already in place.

Even if you go with external hosting you will need to have a plan in place to do things like replace network cards and resolve other local hardware issues.

If the hosting company maintains it you have to look at several things.
a) how reliable are they? If your server is only up 80% of the time you will have problems.

b) What type of support do they provide? Can you call them at 3am and if so do they have someone around who has a clue how to help you?

c) You also need to look at whether you will have your own box at their location or if your data will be sharing a machine with several other companies. a dedicated machine will generally be faster and more secure but will cost you more.



2) Security
A machine at your main office would probably be more secure IF you have someone who knows what they are doing (see the $90K paycheck above) and knows how to lockdown your network, configure firewalls, etc. If you are just going to have Bob the computer geek from accounting set things up you will end up with problems.

The main security concerns with a hosting company usually involve just how much of you proprietary data you are willing to trust them with although you do want to make sure they have a good track record of locking down their servers.

Cost:
If you already have an IT department in place, its usually cheaper to run your own server. If you dont then you will have to do a cost/benefit analysis to see what it will take to get you where you want to be and then compare that with the costs/risks associated with external hosting.

You could easily spend 10's of thousands of dollars in setup costs alone. I strongly suggest hiring someone to come in and take a look at your current setup and requirements as doing it wrong initially can cause some extremely expensive problems once you get further down the line.

Answer 2

Ok, what you need is a domain. a domain will allow all the computers to connect to a central location..

on the otherhand, a local area network is local group of computers connected either peer to peer, or client/server...

a Wide area network is a group of locations connected through a domain using the client/server method. THe local area would rely on the WAN for connections and files. If it goes down, so do you.

now, there are ups and downs for each. if you are using a WAN, you can have more communication, and more synchronization.. but if your primary connection goes down, and you dont have a secondary, youll be stuck with your LAN.

your lan, is faster, and designed more for just office use. network printers, and such. They are nice, but if you have more than 1 centralized connection, example, a few towns over, or say one in new york, one in chicago, a WAN would be better.

You can find a lot of articles on microsoft, or from linux; i prefer linux, but microsoft is so much better..

Either way you will still need a physical server. whether it is in your local network, or wide network. The virtual part would mean that there is a server, somewhere, on the network WAN, or LAN, and that the computers can connect to it. It would still need to be physical..

Now, a LAN would be CHEAPER by far. Less required, but if you're looking to expand, each office will need their own LAN, and if you need a lot of communication, youll be sending a lot of emails.

ontop of that, you can have a virtual private network (VPN). Set up a connection to a server and have each computer connect to it.

There is so much to explain, but i cant in a post, so browse the internet for keywords like.. VPN, LAN, WAN, Windows Server 2003, Domain, Workgroup.. those should help!

Answer 3

You do not have enough information to answer your question.

You would need to know:

How much CPU do you need?
How much disk space to you need?
What type of network traffice do you need?
When does the server need to be up ? 24/7/365?
All of these requirements will change the price dramatically - and I mean by 500 - 1000% sometimes.


My recommendation -have your IT people develop a really good request for proposal, send it out, and get responses back - then you can compare the different price points and offerings of companies that do the outsourced model.

Then compare what it would cost to house it internally - if you don't have an IT department, then you would have to contract a time and materials person / people to maintain your network and boxes.