How to Choose a Business Server

Tower, rack, blade or virtual server: which one should you choose?

In our server buying guide, we walked you through when a business actually needs a server. The server you buy needs to reflect the amount and type of applications you want to run on it, as well as the number of users (clients) that will be connected to it.

Now let's look at the main criteria to evaluate once you know you need one:

1. The type of server: tower, rack, blade or virtual
2. The hardware configuration
3. The server software

Tower servers

Tower servers look a lot like old-style PCs — rectangular boxes standing vertically on the floor, paired with a monitor and keyboard. They're ideal for small businesses that:

• have limited space and need centralized processing without a dedicated data room
• want to make monitoring and maintaining network resources simpler
• need to reduce their attack surface by keeping everything in one central location

It's an entry-level server whose cost and footprint match those of a regular desktop, which is why it's often recommended as a first server. You can choose the number of hard drives and processors it comes with.

To give a couple of practical examples: an office with fewer than 25 employees might be fine with a server with one processor and two to four hard drives. A company with more than 25 employees, on the other hand, might opt for a server with two processors and four to six hard drives.

Rack servers

In this type of setup, servers are mounted horizontally in dedicated rack cabinets — sleeker and more compact than towers — housed in equipped rooms known as data centers. They're ideal for small businesses, but also for medium-sized companies that need more than one server.

Rack servers are designed for businesses that want to optimize space in a centralized data center, that need the flexibility to mix and match the servers best suited to their applications and workloads, and that require extensive dedicated internal storage capacity.

Blade servers

The most compact server is the blade server, ideal for companies that need higher processing performance, lower power consumption and a smaller footprint. Multiple blade servers can be housed vertically in a single enclosure, sharing certain hardware components such as power supplies. Blade servers are a perfect fit for companies that need greater processing capacity or that are planning to build out a data center.

What is a virtual server (VPS)?

A virtual server (also known as a VPS) has all the capabilities of a real, physical server. The only difference is that a dedicated physical server makes all of its hardware resources available to a single user.

In a virtual private server, hardware resources are shared with other guests on the infrastructure, but assigned exclusively to each user. This means that on a virtual machine — with its own RAM, CPU and disk space — you can install any operating system, and therefore any software.

It's a technique that lets you optimize resources, making it possible to run multiple instances on the same platform, both at desktop and server level (Server Virtualization).

How do you configure the hardware of a business server?

Compared to desktop computers, servers come with more advanced hardware capabilities: more multi-core processors, faster memory for higher application performance, more hard drives for greater storage capacity and data redundancy, and specialized network cards.

Server software

A server has more advanced capabilities for sharing data across multiple users. As with business desktop PCs, choosing the right operating system is vital to keeping applications stable. In the same way, servers need a robust operating system able to handle the many thousands of data requests they may face. The choice generally comes down to Microsoft Windows or Linux.

Understanding the server capacity you need to buy means understanding how your company actually uses data. Once you've figured that out, you're already halfway there — all that's left is to make it stable, secure and performant.

If you'd like to know more or want more information, request a free initial IT consultation by filling out the form below with your details.