Top 5 Business Server Upgrades for SMEs
A huge aspect of the small to medium enterprise sphere is staying ahead of your competition. There are a few ways to do this as an SME, but a sure-fire way to keep your business ahead of the curve is to invest in the tech needed to scale your operation.
Every successful SME will have the infrastructure and tech to grow with customer demands while welcoming new business onto the books.
Investing in a solid tech foundation is always a good way to go if you are looking for ways to grow your SME. Handle those demanding, challenging workloads with ease!
Today we’ll cover the top five business server upgrades that SMEs should consider for scaling their business.
Improve Your Storage Capacity
An enterprise is only as good as its ability to store, serve and use data. Without reliant, efficient, and speedy storage solutions, it won’t matter how powerful your servers or workstations are.
Investing a good deal of time into researching what storage solution is best for your SME is a good place to start, but a piece of tech that every enterprise can always use is hard drive disks.
Hard drive disks (HDDs for short) can help you build a solid data storage and transfer foundation. You can equip high-quality HDDs such as Compellent HDDs to improve the data handling capabilities of your servers.
However, other things to consider are storage arrays, solid-state drives and even outsourcing your storage to the various cloud storage options available.
A storage array is ideal for SMEs with a huge quantity of data to manage and serve, whereas cloud storage options are ideal for remote teams needing instant access to gigabytes of data.
You’ll only know what’ll be best for your circumstances, but HDDs are a must in any enterprise operation – so starting there is always a solid choice.
Run Your Operating Systems Off of SSDs
As a brief extension of the above paragraph, solid-state drives are spectacular at speeding up machines. While they don’t have as much storage space as the hard disk drives counterparts, their increased write and read speed times are hugely beneficial to speeding up a computer’s boot time and processing tasks.
It is even worth buying an SSD per workstation or server just for running your OS from it – you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much this can speed a machine up.
Look Into Getting a Power Distribution Unit
If you run a fairly comprehensive SME that uses many different workstations or server machines, then it may be worth investing in a power distribution unit (PDU). These nifty devices ensure that every machine your SME uses gets the power it needs to do its job as efficiently as possible.
Any large-scale SME - such as a data centre – will benefit greatly from this bit of kit as it can also save your machines from surges. Many PDU models come with surge protection built in.
Even for smaller SMEs, a mid-level PDU could be useful. Certainly worth consideration!
Equip Your Machines with More RAM
Random access memory (or RAM) is a great way to speed things up. RAM chips are essential for providing your computer with the memory it needs to accomplish the complex tasks and processes a computer is expected to do. Everything from running memory-intensive applications to running a word processor – RAM is responsible for making it all happen.
But don’t just buy any old RAM chip. For optimal usage of RAM, you’ll need to match RAM types and clock speeds.
For example, many newer techs will use DDR4 or even DDR5 RAM chips. In contrast, older tech tends to use DDR3 chips. In addition, clock speed is important to consider – as chips with different clock speeds can work together, just not as efficiently.
Run a diagnostic on your system to ascertain what kind of RAM you have, the clock speed, and the manufacturer. Matching these three things will ensure you have a speedy RAM upgrade that’ll improve machine efficiency and productivity.
Go Wired
Going wired (instead of wireless) has a lot of benefits in the long run that may not be immediately evident. Yes, it can be a pain to set up, but it also provides the fastest, most secure connection a workstation or server can have to an internal network.
Relying on WiFi can have a multitude of issues. One common issue SMEs can face is disrupting their WiFi signal due to other WiFi signals. If you are in an office complex, there are a lot of other WiFi signals that can interfere with your own and slow down how efficient data transfer is over your network. Going wired can avoid this.
In addition, wired connections leave fewer points of entry for potential attackers (as unlikely as this is, it does happen).
In Summary
Knowing what you’ll need for your own SME is something only you’ll know – however, these upgrades suggested above are a prime place to start when looking to expand.
