Looking for server recommendations

[alkemyst]

I am expanding my 'computer consulting' . I do a ton of IS/IT work for a major homebuilder and in the past many companies...however; I have never been on the planning stage for server level hardware. I am great at maintaining and admin work though.

I have a law firm of 12 associates that is looking to upgrade.

They are paying $60 a month for a 'non-blacklist service', doing tape backups (total harddrive space is only 48gigs), no redundancy, no spam protection....

What is a good level of hardware?

the ex-IS guy was quoting a Dell Poweredge T610 with 360GB (160GB 7.2k SATAx3) and a removable HD backup drive with 4GB RAM, 3 year support, misc for $3600...

Is there a place I can get a crash course on the setup of something like this? I don't feel it's beyond me, but I don't want to commit and be at a loss.

Thanks...

 

[earthman]

What are you trying to upgrade to? A Windows domain for them? It's hard to predict what issues you will run into setting this up, not to mention the software and hardware that may not work properly in that environment. Is that guy quoting just for the hardware or setting it all up? Because if it's the latter, he's pretty confident. You can spend many hours trying to get things to work right, not to mention tutoring people in how to do things differently. This could be a great "starter" project, or a big headache. I would look for a basic book on Windows SBS setup, and study it well.

 

[alkemyst]

He was quoted $1000 labor at a 33% discount (about 15 hours but he set up their old network).

I am imagining just a workgroup. I could do a domain as well, but there are really no admins to take advantage of that.

I have to still do the interview and see exactly what they are running. I know they were thinking of switching from outlook to GMail for Business. They are break-even on their black-list service vs GMail and with GMail the backups and spam protection are handled for them then.