I'd probably offer it as a service for a nominal fee - maybe $25 a month per customer? Of course you run the risk of having multiple customers suffer failures at the same time and they'll be rightfully upset if you don't have the spare hardware available to get them back up when that happens...
Ben M. Schorr Chief Executive Officer Roland Schorr & Tower - Flagstaff Office 928-526-3970 www.rolandschorr.com<http://www.rolandschorr.com/> * www.twitter.com/bschorr<http://www.twitter.com/bschorr> * www.facebook.com/RolandSchorr<http://www.facebook.com/RolandSchorr> From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org] Sent: Sunday, February 3, 2013 10:11 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: SMB IT provider Q I have a couple of clients and they both run SBS2011 Premium in their environments and in both cases I have them on Dell hardware and on top of Hyper-V hosts. It makes sense to me to have "ready spare" hardware, and it seems to me if I had one server in my lab ready to go as a temporary stand-in Hyper-V host I could offer this as a cheaper alternative as to asking them to have a full 2nd server onsite in a cluster. My thinking is: * Have one server, just powerful enough to work as a "stand-in" server in either environment (16GB RAM, enough SAS disk space to cover the biggest Hyper-V host) with an IT Garage licensed 2008 R2 Host OS (both my clients are running this). * If either client has a hard server failure, I run my hardware out and restore their backups to this hardware. This gets them up and running while I resolve whatever the issue might be on their production server * Once their primary system is back up, bring this hardware back to my lab It looks like I can get some hardware in the $1000 range for this, but the catch is I'd like to have my clients offset some if not all of the cost. Would it make sense to offer them this "spare server available" service with a monthly fee associated, or a one-time cost? Surely other IT shops offer the same thing in some fashion. I did a proof-of-concept of this this weekend, I grabbed a client's SBS2011 backup and restored it to my own ITG server (has just 8GB RAM through and SATA not SAS, so not enough oomph to run both SBS2011 and the 2008R2 server that comes with Premium) and restored to it and it worked beautifully. It's possible of course that both clients could have an outage on the same day, in which case I'd totally screwed in many ways, so not sure how to handle not being able to deliver something they've been paying for, except maybe a "if this service can't be delivered then <something>" as they do know that I am a one-man shop with a day job to boot. I may be overlooking some other options here as well, so I am open to suggestions. David Lum Sr. Systems Engineer // NWEATM Office 503.548.5229 // Cell (voice/text) 503.267.9764 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
