Trey's writing and training consulting business has been growing by leaps and bounds in the last year. His company of one has grown to a virtual company of 20 and he's decided to lease office space and bring together his employees, who had previously worked from their homes, so they can be more effective and productive. Currently, each employee keeps the files they create on their desktop systems, and most back those files up to a Zip drive once a week. To share files, employees use e-mail or some space on an FTP server that is associated with the company Web site hosted at a local ISP. The FTP server only has 250 MB of space, however, so the server is only good for file transfer, not file storage.
Trey knows that once the employees are together in an office, they'll need to share printing resources and should have access to a common file server he can easily back up each night. The content and training materials the company creates are its bread and butter, so they need to be both accessible and easy to protect.
On average, most employees create about 5 GB of data per year, so Trey will need 100 GB of space to support his current employees, and other 100 GB for the data they will create in the next two and half years, or a total of 200 GB of disk storage space.
Finally, Trey plans to support five shared office printers and an MFP from his file and print servers.
Trey puts all of this information together and consults with his local reseller to choose the right server. He eventually settles on a HP ProLiant ML110 with a 2.8 GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 processor with Hyper-Threading Technology, 512 MB of memory, and three 80 GB ATA hard drives that come with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 already installed. He knows the ML110 is specifically designed with small businesses in mind, and while it may look like a desktop -- and is priced like one -- Trey is confident it will give him the processing power and performance his growing company need. While Trey is confident he can get his file and print server set up with some help from a consultant he often recruits for technical writing, he does choose to purchase a Care Pack hardware support package that gives him access to technical support during business hours for three years.
Because only 20 people will access the server and will use it mainly to work with files and print documents, one processor and the 512 MB of memory are enough for now. However, the ML110 is expandable, so he can increase the server's memory to 4 GB if necessary. Given his data projections, the three 80 GB hard drives will more than meet Trey's needs for the next couple of years, but he can expand his server to accommodate 320 GB if business soars and he has more data than he ever expected.
Trey chose the ProLiant ML110 because it meets his needs now and fits his budget, but can also grow with his needs. The server is easy to install and maintain, and Trey has it up and running when his employees walk into work for their first day in the new office.
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