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What should I be looking for in a small business server?

I need to buy a small business server but I am not sure what I should be looking for and struggling to understand the specs on sites like ebuyer, like this one for example: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/140153 * I am looking for something that will enable me to pull out a hard drive, can accept a tape drive for backups, etc. Please can you tell what are the buzz words that i should be looking out for? *What server OS should I get? * I intend to purchase a client/server software application that only runs on Microsoft systems, so am I right in presuming that I must get some sort of Microsoft server OS? * I would also like to be able to access the server remotely, so what should I be looking for to enable me to do this? * Is it worth considering something like this? It looks appealing for a relative novice like myself. If no good, why? So many questions and I have do have a learning curve to get over in a short time. Thanks in advance for your help and in-depth answers

Public Comments

1. To be fair its often down to cost but I would strongly recommend HP Proliant servers. First they support hot plug drives, you can remove them should they fail so you don't need an engineer to replace one I would recommend you put 2 drives as a mirrored pair running your operating system, this will provide the best performance and allow one drive failure so you have redundancy. Then have 3 drives running raid 5 or 4 drives running raid 6 - raid 5 allows one drive to fail, raid 6 allows up to 2 - the over heads are that raid 5 and 6 are slower accessing their data. I would put a strong operating system in such as server 2003 so you have many years of future proofing ahead. Don't worry if your server does not have enough space internally for a tape drive, you can purchase external DLT drives which offer superb back up performance - an external option would allow it to be serviced without the server being powered down for the majority of faults. With HP Proliant servers they incorporate ILO - Interegrated Lights Out, this allows you to administer the server remotely , you can shut the server down, reboot, monitor errors etc and is a fantastic tool. If you want remote windows access just use the Windows remote terminal console or something such as VNC. ILO stays powered up seperate to the server so you can actually access it then power up the server from 100's of miles away ! HP setup is very straighy forward ,you can get all this very much preconfigured by a supplier for very little cost - I'm running many servers with the same configuration (mirrored and raid 5 drives), I also have additional redundant components such as power supplies, internal fans so my servers can carry on working even if an internal component fails. Back all this up with a strong UPS this will protect the server and also ensure that should power fail it will give the server time to shut down in the event the UPS starts to run low. I wouldn't recommend by the way that you pull hard drives in and out of a server as you are thinking, the backplane will not tolerate repeated insertions etc. You are better to put the drives in a decent raid configuration then leave them.