Newbury Business Today

IT matters

8th July 2010

Email: richard.maynard@newburynews.co.uk

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In this regular column Charles Zealey, of ITSolve, covers all aspects of business and personal computing. If you have a question about IT matters, e-mail it to Charles at: itmatters@itsolve.co.uk

Most businesses of any size have one.  It is probably black or grey.  It makes a little noise. It sits in the back room or in the corner of the office, and apart from keeping the room warm it seems to have very little purpose.   It’s called the server.
It seems to have very little purpose until one day when it stops working.  Then you get to find out where your documents are stored, where the e-mail gets delivered, and how your orders get processed and your stock managed.  Life gets difficult as you realise how much that server means to you.  For most businesses there is nothing more important than that server.
Show some care
So it is surprising that so little attention is given to it.  Does it still have a maintenance contract?  It probably has RAID disks (that is multiple disks enabling the system to carry on in the event that one disk fails).  Do you have a spare disk?  How would you know if a disk failed anyway?  What about other spare parts?  How quickly could you get them if you needed to?
You have back-ups I’m sure.  Have you tested them?  Have you a plan for rebuilding the system should you need to.  Do you know how long it would take even if you needed no parts?  Do you have a way of continuing to run the business while that takes place?
Know what you want
If you are considering replacing the server you do well to ensure that the design makes use of the latest technologies in order to make it more resilient.  You can read more about this elsewhere in this copy of Newbury Business Today.
There are a lot of questions this week.  As ever, getting answers means understanding what your real requirements are.  When you can state precise requirements for the resilience of each element of your systems you can begin to design a solution to meet those needs.  It will probably be costly, but how much is peace of mind worth?

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