As McCoy would say, “He’s dead Jim”
Yesterday we discussed how mobile computing platforms will soon leave the desktop PC dead and buried (well, hopefully recycled, not buried). The server is also fading in importance, but at the same time is gaining importance. How can this be? Server roles are moving into the cloud, but, even in the cloud, something has to run the applications and host the data.
VMWare, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, IBM, and a host of other players are all touting the advantages of virtualization. Slicing up a server into a bunch of smaller ”virtual” servers that can be moved from physical box to physical box (often on the fly) provides some compelling advantages over racks and racks of underutilized hardware.
Most virtualization is being done at the enterprise level, on large servers. But the growth market for virtualization is the SMB space (less than 100 users) where businesses have traditionally used Microsoft’s Small Business Server(SBS). The traditional roll of SBS is to host a website, centrally store files, and provide email services.
Lets take a look at those areas and see how the cloud will impact the SMB Server market.
Web hosting
It doesn’t make much sense to host your website on premises any more. There are clear cost savings (both hard and soft) by moving your website to a hosted solution. Often the hosting companies will include periodic updates for free. Their data centers will have up-times much higher than most SMB’s can claim. There are host of value added services (Microsoft Sharepoint, SEO, Database drive pages, etc.) these hosting companies provide as well.
Central file storage
Numerous companies offering cloud based file hosting/sync services (Microsoft Skydrive, Dropbox, etc.). The beauty of these services is your data is backed up automatically in the cloud. So you have anywhere access and backup. Synchronization technologies will help ensure that you have local access to the data even when the cloud is unavailable.
Email services
Unless your an organization with more than about 30 people, hosting Exchange/email locally is just not a prudent decision. Managing the server, the users, the spam, the updates, etc. is just not a cost effective way to deliver email services. Hosted exchange is quickly becoming a commodity item that provides all the collaboration and robust mobile device support for a reasonable price. Oh, and backups are taken care assuming you have a reputable provider.
Where does this leave the traditional SBS server for the SMB market? Might as well dress it in a red shirt, ‘cuz it’s only a mater of time before McCoy delivers his all-too-familiar line.
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