Putting Together A Linux Office

What do small businesses care most about when purchasing IT equipment? Price and reliability, mostly, and only when disaster strikes do they pay attention to the benefits of having data redundancy and protection. As such, while small businesses are often tempted to use desktops as file servers because they are cheaper and simpler to manage, solution providers need to consider bona fide servers with backup utilities and other management tools that arrive with servers.

After looking at some of the latest SMB file servers on the market, CRN Test Center engineers selected Hewlett-Packard's new Advanced Micro Devices-powered servers, which were released in March. The entry-level servers were price-competitive and came bundled with SUSE or Red Hat Linux.

With a starting price of $499, the ProLiant ML115 is the lowest entry-level server in HP's new line. The $499 price covers a single-core AMD Athlon processor with one 80-Gbyte SATA drive, without an OS. For an additional $179, HP will install and configure SUSE Linux Enterprise on the server. The SUSE server is the lowest price point HP is offering for these servers, but HP will also build the ML115 with Red Hat Linux, Windows 2000 and 2003 server and Microsoft Small Business Server. The ML115 server also supports AMD's dual-core Opteron. Both configurations come with ECC memory.

As tested, the ML115 arrived with the basic configuration running SUSE Enterprise Linux. HP did a good job integrating Linux tools and features with the server, and out of the box, all the internal devices worked perfectly.

Next: Setting Up The Server