small business

I was interested to see a call by Tom of New Rowley for a home-orientated Mac server for storing all the digital music, video and photographs people are collecting. The product described by this post was very similar to the one I described as ideal for the small business sector a while back. It is nice to see that I am not completely crazy and that such a product would satisfy a couple of juicy markets. Whilst I do not think I would buy one for my house I am pretty sure an iServe for the home would be a lot better than the current crop of large external storage devices available for the average consumer. Read more »

Probably the biggest untapped server market out there is at the small business level (two to twenty people). At the moment there are a number of Small Business Server (SBS) solutions in this market from a number of companies:

The desktops are the servers

Using Windows file sharing, Samba and Bonjour the business configures their own little desktop-based server for file and print sharing. Thanks to semi-intelligent Internet gateways from the likes of Linksys/DLink that handle DNS and DHCP setting this sort of thing up is relatively easy. Whilst ugly this is probably the most common file/print/Internet sharing solution in most non-tech related small businesses. Unfortunately when things go wrong they can really go very bad, I've seen a number of desktop-servers go belly up because of Internet spyware and viruses.
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Linux provides an excellent platforms for web, email, file and print services. Whilst extremely effective in larger businesses, distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE/Novell are too extensive and time intensive to be used within small businesses as a general purpose server. Read more »