How to sell servers to SMBs

Buying patterns in small business

What's the right decision when choosing a first server?

Most micro businesses shanghai a desktop PC into the role of makeshift server. As a small business adds staff and IT overheads increase, the business owner is faced with a difficult decision. The right upgrade depends on how fast the business is growing.

The business owner with modest expectations and a budget to match might decide the most sensible course of action is to shell out for a single-socket system powered by Intel's Dual Core or Core i5 or i7 processor.
The performance gain might be modest but to the owner he or she now has a system that vendors call a server.

This lowers the barrier to entry for a fully fledged server and is a common intermediary step, says Gartner's Errol Rasit.

"We do consistently see that there are desktop branded CPUs going into towers and racks and customers deploying that. It's the smallest step up from a desktop acting as a server, and they come in at a similar price point as well," says Rasit.

Money is not the only restricting factor. There is a significant skills difference between maintaining a tower server and a rack-mountable server. For example, the former can plug straight into the wall socket while the latter can require a dedicated power supply.

However, if the business grows quickly and is forced to upgrade within the useful life of that single-socket server, the business owner has made the wrong decision.

A dual-socket system costs less than two single-socket servers yet can often deliver greater power and a wider range of features, including enterprise-class options that benefit businesses of all sizes.

The main volume for all vendors is in rack-mounted, two unit, two-socket servers. Sales of blade servers are also growing, which are easier to manage and more energy efficient.

Another attraction is the reduction in cabling. The back of many server cabinets is a mess of Ethernet, fibre channel and power cables. Upgrading to blade servers can untangle spaghetti set-ups.

Still, blade servers are not for every small business. "You have to find the appropriate place for it.
We don't try to move all customers to blade," says Dell's Jon McBride.

Power efficiency and processor speeds remain strong selling points, especially given the fact that 40 percent of servers in use by businesses are single core or first-generation dual-core servers, according to Intel.

The latest multi-core servers, such as HP's G7 server, offer a 20 to one increase in performance. Power management techniques now trace where each watt is spent, spinning up fans only if needed.
HP claims its G7 is 96 percent more efficient than the G4 it replaces, which was released in 2004.

"When Intel released the Westmere processor they talked about an eight month ROI. From our G4 servers to the G7 you have a two month ROI," says HP's Raymond Maisano.

Matching the right size server to a business requires understanding its plans for growth. If fast growth is on the cards, it is wiser to spend more on IT, earlier.