HP Proliant Servers
The machines on which we stake our reputation, and your data.
Why do we only use HP Proliant Servers?
Mostly, this is because of our lengthy and positive experience with them. When properly configured and maintained, there is no reason why you should ever suffer data loss due to hardware failure. HP is a market leader for industry-standard servers. The Proliant range use standards based technologies to achieve the best possible reliability, performance and manageability. From the chassis to the firmware, these machines have been properly designed and tested. The build quality is intended for machines that are used all day, every day, for years on end.
All the parts that fail the most often - the hard drives, fans, and power supplies, can be easily swapped out live. Because all HP Proliant servers are certified for use with Windows Server, you achieve the maximum stability and performance from your Operating System. In addition, HP server agents allow for close monitoring of all the critical system components. This allows us to remotely monitor the servers for any failing components, or environmental factors that could cause hardware failure. Our experience of HP support is very positive. At the very least, you can expect next day onsite response for servers within the 3 year's manufacturer warranty. The purchase of additional support plans can decrease this to a 4 hour onsite response. The servers are flexible, and can grow with your business, and its increasing IT demands. Capacity and performance can easily be upgraded, with the addition of more hard drives, more RAM, or an additional processor. I/O performance - that is, the speed the machine can read and write data, is exceptional as the machines are configured with hardware RAID with substantial write caching enabled. This results in better performance of your network, and a more satisfactory experience for your users.
Are you tied in to HP? Are you on commission?
Certainly not. We are an independent IT consultancy and use hardware from many different manufacturers. For the
server component in SME networks however, we always recommend an HP Proliant.
How much do they cost?
There are many HP Proliants in the range, and this depends on your capacity and performance requirements, how large a tape backup you require, what Operating System and software you install, and whether you are deploying a server cabinet, or a standalone tower machine.
The machines shown are HP Proliant ML370 G5 servers, in tower and rack mount versions. The rack mount version is intended to be deployed in a server cabinet. A dual core Xeon HP Proliant G5, configured with RAID 5 (multiple hard drives allowing failure of up to two hard drives without data loss) and 2GB RAM will cost from approx £2500 + VAT. On top of this, you need to consider the Operating System (Windows Server), Backup software and hardware, anti-virus software, UPS, and (where required), a server cabinet.
Are there cheaper HP Proliants?
Yes, there are, but for the purposes of most SMEs, where you are not clustering servers, and where these machines will be holding all of your critical data, we consider that the servers with hardware RAID are the entry level. All Net Therapy customers have servers from the ML3XX, ML5XX, DL3XX and DL5XX series servers, which offer the best combination of reliability and value.