Help with an small network RFP (request for proposal)

dvsman

dvsman

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BACKGROUND: Okay guys, I work in a small office with 9 people (users) in it and our current network / intranet is an Dell poweredge 2600 with 2.4ghz / 4gb ram, 6x 72gb 10,000rpm HDs in a RAID5 on Windows Small Business 2003 (with Sharepoint running on top of it). This is used mostly scheduling, shared printing and receiving / storing / sharing word / excel files. No pics / videos.

All of our webserving and email is outsourced (separate).

We are setting our fiscal year budget for 2018 (which starts in October 2017) and we might actually be getting money for a server update (WOOHOO!).

QUESTION: My question to you guys is this: How much would be a reasonable amount to ask the for for a replacement turnkey setup (updated hardware + software) + software transfer + testing?

The hardware doesn't have to be Dell or even brandname, but should have some redundancy / file backup in case of hardware failure.

It's not my department (I'm just a weekend gaming geek) but I'm on the procurement committee and I want to have some idea of whether someone / a salesman is giving me a number that is good / too high or too low. Thanks!
 
Is the SharePoint install customized? SQL databases on the same box? Is this box also a domain controller?

If sharepoint isn't customized, and it 's just an update/upgrade of vanilla SP 2003/2007/2010 to a newer version, that's not too bad - maybe 10 hours. Hardware wise, I would guess about 2-4K for a good server depending on how much storage you need. To just install Windows and migrate your existing apps (assuming no AD) and test them, I'd guess another 5K in services if you can find someone reasonable, depending on complexity.

If you have AD on the box also, and need to forklift replace everything, from AD to SP and SQL, you could be out a couple of weeks of someone's consulting time, which could run up to 14K at market rates.

If your sharepoint install is customized and requires re-implementation, then all bets are off.
 
I'm just a dumb user, but if a Sharepoint setup needs an SQL then I'd guess there's an SQL in there somewhere :-D

Anyway thanks Masamune! That's exactly what I needed / was looking for.
 
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Out of curiosity, have you considered just sending this stuff to the cloud/Office365? As long as your internet pipe is sufficient, there's probably a good case to be made there...
 
I've asked about that myself - being a tech geek, but I think (as you can guess from the age of the hardware), there are regs somewhere about buying hardware and getting hardware. The cloud is probably still a foreign concept to those further up the ladder.

Plus, we have Comcast Business and though it's better than my Comcast home (I think we've only had maybe 1 or 2 outages a year at the office due to new construction / random acts of spaghetti monster), I'm sure people would be freaking out if the internet pipe went out and they suddenly couldn't access their files. Plus some of the files are in foreign languages and MS Office is pretty sensitive to foreign fonts and punctuation, not sure how Office 365 would react to files created in various localized foreign language versions of MS Office.
 
365 is a great choice for email, sharepoint and the like. You could potentially get a redundant internet connection to provide reliable access. There will be no issues with character set or file language vs what you have now. It'll still take some effort to migrate everything up there - but then you will be paying a subscription of about $10/user/month for the cloud services and your local copy of office.
 
If you're in procurement you should be seeing a commodity server and a backup unit box (Probably a Synology/QNAP/Buffalo NAS)
Maybe OS/Hypervisor licenses & a backup product license.

If your company IT environment requires high availability you'll probably see an offer for a Hyperconverged appliance like StarWind or Scale and a NAS.
Be alert if you see Nutanix appearing in the quotes. Be even more worried if someone tries to buy blade servers and a separate SAN box.
Good luck with the project!

PS: Kudos to folks who mentioned Office 365, no real need for a full Exchange server these days.
 
Thanks guys for all the input. Will definitely keep all this info in mind!
 
In regards to hardware renewal, i would recommend looking at StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, they use Dell hardware, do storage redundancy with their own StarWind Virtual SAN, VM redundancy is handled by hypervisor cluster of your choice (Hyper-V, VMware) as for the backup software they offer Veeam Backup&Replication. This whole solution is fully supported by StarWind and they will always be your single point of contact.
They also are Dell OEM partner that shares the discount with their customers, this way the price is very nice, around $10k per box.
 
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