Itwerx is a managed IT provider working with businesses in Seattle, Everett and Lynnwood, and specifying servers has been part of the job since 2005. This is a buyer’s guide to the choices that matter and the ones that do not.
Skip SOHO – it is not really a server
Server manufacturers – Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Supermicro among them – generally sell across three tiers. The low end, often labelled SOHO for small office or home office, is essentially a PC in a bigger case, sometimes with hot-swap drive bays. Middle of the road is built more like a tower PC but adds server-grade options like hardware RAID and system telemetry, plus an optional rackmount kit. High end is always rackmount, with a wide range of configuration options.
Cross SOHO off the list immediately; it is not a server in any sense that matters for a business. Middle of the road can be a reasonable choice for a single location with only a handful of business applications and a few terabytes of data – but insist on redundant power and hardware RAID specifically, not a software RAID implementation dressed up to look like one.
Why high end is usually the right answer anyway
The core difference between a PC and a server is blast radius: if a PC dies, it affects one person. If a server dies, it can affect the entire company. That asymmetry is why high end is, more often than not, the actual right answer across the board, and fortunately the range of options at that tier is wide enough to avoid overpaying for capability nobody needs.
Specify for the future, not just today
Most small-business servers today function as a virtual machine host, consolidating what used to be several standalone systems and their storage, sometimes with multiple hosts for redundancy. The key planning question is not just what you need today but whether the chassis leaves room to add CPU, RAM or storage later without a forklift upgrade, even if you are not paying for that capacity up front.
Follow what datacentres buy, and time it to quarter end
The datacentre market is large, and manufacturers cater to it closely, optimizing for the balance datacentres care about between capital and operating cost, plus reliability. Even though a typical datacentre lifecycle runs only about four years, manufacturers design that same hardware for closer to ten years of service to keep failure rates low – so following the models bought in volume by datacentres is a reasonable shortcut to a well-built server.
Timing matters too. A model series typically runs three to four years with roughly a year of overlap between generations. Skip the first six months of a new series to let early bugs get resolved, and buy during the overlap, when the outgoing series is at its best pricing. Pricing improves further toward the end of a quarter, especially the fourth, as sales teams work to hit quarterly and annual targets.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our hardware lifecycle work deals with – talk to us about yours.
