How about making sure the boss gets a workstation class machine as his desktop? That way in the event of an incident (when the boss will be busy running around doing other things) you can drop the drives in and reboot. This might only cost a few £100 more when he next gets a new desktop.
I know of one guy who used to always use workstation class machines for SBS anyway - so if you have a few in the office you have redundancy on site. Mike From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org] Sent: 04 February 2013 15:35 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SMB IT provider Q I am similar, I am fortunate that my SMB clients run similar hardware and Hyper-V, and if my home server was powerful enough I wouldn't feel the need to try and charge for it. I too shoot for consistency (ok, except anti-virus vendors). I've been doing SMB support for 12 years now and also have yet to need this service but that doesn't mean it might not happen. Perhaps I'll give them the options and see how they vote. From: Art DeKneef [mailto:art.dekn...@cox.net] Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2013 4:41 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SMB IT provider Q That is a service I provide my clients. But I haven't charged them for the service. Probably because in the past 20 years I have been running my own shop I had to bring in a temp server just twice. And because both times the office was broken into and the server was stolen. Different clients. At one client the thieves were kind enough to remove the backup tape from the server and left it on the table. All my servers are basically the same based on the software installed. Meaning all my physical single SBS 2011 servers are the same, servers for Hyper-V hosting are the same. I also work in the SMB space and this has worked well for me for several years. I like consistency. I have a 4 server lab currently. If a customer needed a server for something RIGHT NOW I would pull one of the lab servers. The lab servers are almost identical to customer servers. There have 32 GB instead of 16 GB RAM. Like Mike said, needing a server like this is very rare. Or has been in my experience. If there is a server problem you usually will have some kind of warning and can go from there. Having a good backup plan and disaster recovery options are better options I think. Art From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org] Sent: Sunday, February 3, 2013 12:46 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SMB IT provider Q This is actually the other idea I was considering, have this 2nd server host the patching/anti-virus, etc stuff on a VM and the host could also store the backup images and be leveraged in an emergency. From: Mike Hoffman [mailto:m...@drumbrae.net] Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2013 10:56 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SMB IT provider Q Why not give the clients each a server which can be re-tasked at short notice? If you store the backup images on a device that you can hyper-v up if necessary then it has great value for the client to have available for themselves. We have a few servers running Hyper-v which we are reconfiguring to do some failover - the plan is that if we need a server at short notice we simply sacrifice the failovers and move the box. The licensing is taken care via a SPLA license or the clients existing licenses. It is very rate to actually need to deploy a spare server, think of recovery objectives. If the server is down they can still work, emails can back-up with the ISP, individual files can be recovered and any server repairs (e.g. new backplane) can be scheduled to minimise disruption. If a client really needs that level of redundancy then they can afford to pay fully for it. 25 users, $4 per user per month = $1200 per year. Don't promise what you can't deliver, but you know the clients well. It might be worth getting involved with a local IT company just to cover your back just in case. Mike From: Ben M. Schorr [mailto:b...@rolandschorr.com] Sent: 03 February 2013 17:31 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SMB IT provider Q 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<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<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<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<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<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
