How much should a basic server cost?

[DSF]

So, I'm a math teacher at a small charter school. I also serve as the main IT person unless something is way over my head.

Our current server for the teacher network is aging, and needs to be replaced soon I think. It just seems a tad unstable, plus the storage is too limited for our current needs.

How much should replacing it cost? It doesn't need to do much other than be a print server for 3 printers, a DNS server for about 30 machines, and store shared files like student projects, photographs, school forms, and report cards.

Dell's educational division basically told us they couldn't build anything that would suit us for less than $4000. That seems like baloney to me, but maybe I just don't know enough about servers. What sort of hardware should I be looking at? Is Dell the best option or should I go another route?

 

[krnmastersgt]

While the price is high for just the hardware, aren't you also paying for their tech support/servicing? What were the specs on the actual hardware anyways?

 

[Ken g6]

It doesn't need to do much other than be a print server for 3 printers

"Print server"? Most printers these days can hook to the network directly. But as that would require reconfiguring all computers using the printers, it might make more sense to set up a server.

a DNS server for about 30 machines

Doable.

and store shared files like student projects, photographs, school forms, and report cards.

Aha! This is where it gets complicated. I assume you don't want everyone, e.g. students, to have access to changing all this stuff. You need access control. I imagine this has been provided by the district's MS Exchange server. So what you currently have is another Exchange server for the network drives. Dell isn't just charging for the hardware; they're charging for the MS Exchange Server software!

If you have someone experienced in Linux, yes, you could probably set up CUPS, DNS, and Samba on a Linux server. But does anyone in the district have the experience (and authorization) to do this?

 

[DSF]

Doable.
Aha! This is where it gets complicated. I assume you don't want everyone, e.g. students, to have access to changing all this stuff. You need access control. I imagine this has been provided by the district's MS Exchange server. So what you currently have is another Exchange server for the network drives. Dell isn't just charging for the hardware; they're charging for the MS Exchange Server software!

That's not actually an issue. The student network has a separate server with its own storage. When I said storing student projects, I meant teachers storing final versions of student-made videos and such. Sorry that wasn't clear. Students do not need access of any kind to the teacher server.

As far as having someone in the district set things up, we intentionally use the city school system's IT department as little as possible. They have their own city-wide network which comes with its own extremely restrictive filtering. That filtering is non-negotiable (and their tech support is not always timely) and so we choose to use our own network, although that means they will not directly maintain it for us.

We do contract with an outside IT group for the larger issues, and I'll be discussing this with them as well. I basically wanted to get an idea of what range of hardware I should be looking at so I know whether the quotes we get are in the right ballpark or not.

As far as the print server thing, I wasn't around when the whole system was set up, that was done by some IT-savvy parent volunteers about 7 years ago.

 

[nsafreak]

Your main cost is going to be a Windows server with enough CALs to support 30 users. The hardware is probably gping to run about 1,200.

 

[mfenn]

Aha! This is where it gets complicated. I assume you don't want everyone, e.g. students, to have access to changing all this stuff. You need access control. I imagine this has been provided by the district's MS Exchange server. So what you currently have is another Exchange server for the network drives. Dell isn't just charging for the hardware; they're charging for the MS Exchange Server software!

Uhhh, exchange is for email. Were you thinking of SharePoint?

 

[mfenn]

Dell's educational division basically told us they couldn't build anything that would suit us for less than $4000. That seems like baloney to me, but maybe I just don't know enough about servers. What sort of hardware should I be looking at? Is Dell the best option or should I go another route?

It really depends on what that $4000 includes. If it's just the hardware, yeah I'd say that that is nonsense. Print serving and DNS for 30 machines could be handled by a Pentium III.

File serving gets more complex and really depends on the amount of storage, performance, and redundancy that you need. Given what you've described though, I'd imagine that 1TB is more space than you'd ever dream of using and you're not going to have more that 5-10 concurrent users hitting relatively small files. In that case, a simple RAID1 of two 1TB SATA drives would probably be fine, though I wouldn't fault anyone who wanted to do a RAID10 of four 500GB drives. Don't forget about offsite backup! If the district doesn't have any backup services, consider the cloud.

As for software licensing, that really depends on whether or not you need this thing to be a Windows server or if you are fine using open source. As Ken alluded to, Linux can do all the things that you need, but it will take a little more expertise than setting up a typical Windows server box.