That's why I always sell Dell Pro Support.  If their business is critical, 5 
Years of 2 or 4 hour 7x24 Onsite Service.  If the server is older than 5 years, 
replace it.

Let Dell carry the risk of their hardware.

Michael Walker
Senior Network Engineer
Citrus Valley Health Partners
1115 S. Sunset Ave, West Covina, CA  91723
Phone/Fax/Pager: (888) 299-6882
mwal...@mail.cvhp.org<mailto:mwal...@mail.cvhp.org>

From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org]
Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2013 9:11 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


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