Investing in enterprise hosts for your growing business is a big decision that requires careful consideration. There are many factors to weigh and questions to ask to ensure you choose the right solution that meets your needs now and has room to grow as your company expands.
We’ll walk through 9 critical questions you need to answer before making such an important technology purchase. From assessing your current and future infrastructure needs to budgeting and maintenance requirements, addressing these queries upfront will help you select enterprise servers tailored for your unique situation.
Read on for an in-depth look at what you need to investigate before investing in your enterprise IT.
1. What Are Your Current Infrastructure Demands and Future Growth Projections?
Before shopping for servers, you should do proper research on what a server is and take stock of your organization’s technology needs as they stand today. How many physical and virtual servers do you require? What applications and software do they run? Also, consider where your business is headed.
Do you anticipate substantial hiring or new divisions that will increase the infrastructure load? Getting a clear picture of present and potential future requirements will guide your selection of servers with ample power and scalability.
2. What Are Your Uptime and Reliability Requirements?
Enterprise servers must maintain constant availability to avoid disrupting crucial business operations. Consider how much downtime your organization can tolerate. Do you need servers with redundant components to minimize the impact of failures?
What is an acceptable maintenance window? Servers offering high availability features like hot swap drives, dual power supplies and RAID support can deliver the reliability level required to keep your business running smoothly. Weighing your uptime and reliability needs up front helps narrow options to servers engineered for your specific requirements.
3. What Is Your Budget For Servers and Ongoing Costs?
Purchasing enterprise-grade servers involves a significant initial investment that requires forethought and planning. Research average costs for the types and number of servers aligned with your needs to set a realistic budget.
Factor in additional anticipated expenses like support agreements, operating system licenses, storage and networking gear. Consider future-proofing your investment by allocating funds for server upgrades every 3 to 5 years as technology advances. With a clear budget, you can identify servers that provide the best value and performance within financial constraints.
4. What Server Brands and Models are Supported by Your IT Team?
For smooth ongoing management, choose servers your in-house IT staff or vendors have experience deploying and troubleshooting. Familiarity with a server platform streamlines maintenance tasks, from basic administration to complex issues.
It prevents costly learning curves and potential support delays as your technical team gets up to speed on an unfamiliar system. When evaluating options, inquire about your IT team’s comfort level and expertise with various server brands to facilitate easy internal support.
5. What Operating Systems Will Servers Run On, and For How Long?
Enterprise servers support a range of OSes, from Windows to Linux varieties. Consider what software your applications require now and may utilize in the future as needs change. Some servers extend OS life cycles for 5+ years, while others offer only 3 years of updates.
Matching your OS upgrade schedule with servers’ support timelines prevents premature hardware replacements down the road. Flexible servers allowing multiple OS installations let you test new software before committing. When selecting models, investigate OS licensing costs, the length of free updates from the vendor, and your ability to run future OS versions seamlessly.
6. What Storage and Memory Capacities are Required Initially and Long-Term?
Start by assessing your applications’ baseline storage consumption, including room for data growth.
Factor in additional capacity demands from system software, virtual machines, databases and backups. Consider expanding the use of virtualization and your potential to consolidate servers on fewer powerful platforms over time.
Servers with field-upgradable components allow scaling memory and storage non-disruptively. Select models provide initial configurations that meet present needs while allowing simple expansion to larger capacities, ensuring a long lifecycle.
Standardized server platforms also simplify adding new capacity through identical spares for streamlined management.
7. What Server Form Factors and Physical Attributes are Needed?
Enterprise servers come in a range of sizes, from compact 1U rack mounts to towering towers. Evaluate your deployment environment, including available rack space and cooling and power requirements, to determine optimal form factors.
Consider portability needs if servers must be moved for upgrades or disaster recovery. Blade servers consolidate infrastructure but require dedicated enclosures. Towers offer flexibility for testing outside racks.
Redundant components like hot-swap fans and dual power supplies ensure uptime in demanding 24/7 settings. Carefully consider physical attributes to seamlessly integrate servers into your unique data center environment and workloads.
8. What Integrated and Third-Party Management Tools are Supported?
Easily administering and monitoring servers remotely is critical. What is server management like? Well, you should look for robust built-in management capabilities, including virtual media, remote console access, hardware monitoring and firmware updates.
Compatibility with third-party tools like VMware vCenter and Microsoft SCOM allows you to consolidate servers into your existing management framework. Leverage APIs and scripting support for streamlining repetitive tasks.
Cloud-based management portals provide oversight from any location. Deep integration with monitoring applications delivers granular insight into performance, capacity and issues.
Choosing servers that support your preferred management methods simplifies tasks and speeds problem resolution.
9. What Onboard Security and Identity Features are Important?
Enterprise servers hold sensitive corporate and customer data, requiring stringent safeguards. Consider access controls, authentication options, encrypted storage and network security features important for your compliance needs. Look for TPM and UEFI secure boot to verify boot integrity and hardware-based encryption.
Role-based administration and multifactor authentication uphold security best practices. Servers with a history of firmware and BIOS updates receive ongoing hardening against newly discovered vulnerabilities. Work with your security team to prioritize identity and access management, data protection, and compliance requirements when evaluating server security postures.
In Summary
Choosing the right enterprise servers is a weighty decision that sets the technical foundation for your growing business. By thoroughly investigating the 9 questions outlined here before making any purchases, you can feel confident selecting platforms tailored for your unique infrastructure needs, budget, management preferences and security requirements both today and in the future. Doing your due diligence upfront smooths deployment and prevents costly issues down the road.
