Well Cisco is now offering small business access points that do just that. The new AP541N access points support 802.11n and are a perfect fit for the small business environment.

If you require more than what this offers you can always move up to a controller based solution, however for most small businesses these access points would do just fine.

You can read more about them here.

-RP

Because with 3 TB sata drives you can greatly increase your capacity in an SMB NAS or SAN device. For example, the latest QNAP devices support 3 TB sata drives. In an 8 drive capacity QNAP, you have 24 TB of raw storage for a really cheap price point!

Sure, you don’t necessarily get the enterprise grade features, but when it comes to very small businesses, this is all they need. Whether you use the storage for backup or virtualization, you’ll have more than enough storage to last you a while. Especially at this price point you can double up and create an offsite replication as well.

-RP

Now this method of measurement can work, but there are often other factors to consider. I have seen very small businesses with enterprise level needs, such as high end disaster recovery solutions with hot sites that are required because the type of data they are working on is time sensitive and needs immediate access 24×7.

Then I have seen large businesses with many employees that are ok if the network is down for a little bit as they have other ways of working.

What I am trying to say here is to not base a client’s requirements based on the number of employees, but base it on their actual IT needs. When you do this, you will end up choosing the right equipment at the right price to solve your IT woes.

-RP

Well, there are a few pieces to the puzzle you’ll need, but here is a nice little solution you can put together for not a lot of money. For the purposes of my example I’ll use HP servers, but you can fill in the blanks with your own vendor of choice. Everything mentioned here is on the VMware HCL(hardware compatibility list).

First of all, here are the ingredients you’ll need:

• vSphere 4 Essentials
• Veeam Backup and Replication
• QNAP 459 Pro network attached storage device with some fast 1 TB hard drives
• Two HP ML350 tower servers or two DL380 rack mount servers with maxed out local SAS storage, redundant fans and power supplies, and upgraded battery backed cache with advanced iLO for remote management.
• HP 1810 series 24 port gigabit switch

So what I would do is setup the two servers of your choice with VMware installed on them, and use the tons of local storage as the storage place for your virtual machines. For the purposes of this example we’ll call the first server “server1″ and the second server “server2″.

Then create a vCenter server that is virtualized. This server can also act as your management box. Install Veeam Backup and Replication on this management server. Configure the QNAP device on your network using iSCSI and mount it so the management VM can mount the storage as a drive letter.

Setup Veeam to run backup jobs to the QNAP device and then setup Veeam to run replication jobs from server1 to server2 and vice versa.

Voila! You end up with external backups to the QNAP device, and you end up with virtual machine replicas of each virtual machine on the opposite vSphere server. If you need offsite backup, you can add some usb drives and connect them to your QNAP device to offload the backups to them to take them off site or you can buy another QNAP device for remote replication.

All in all a quick and dirty SMB solution that actually works!

-RP

Now when I talk to enterprise customers, this answer is pretty cut and dry. Enterprise customers usually have a great need for rack density, the ability to fit a ton of servers in a small amount of space, along with stringent power and cooling requirements for their data center. In the enterprise world, blades are an easy sell in my opinion.

However in the SMB sector, blades enter a gray area. Most of the time, you can achieve what you need with two powerfully equipped rack mounted servers, vSphere 4, and some iSCSI storage. But if you have an SMB business with enterprise type needs, then blades might be for you. HP’s c-class blade system the C3000 or “shorty” as they like to call it addresses those needs. Join that with the enterprise version of vSphere and some high end iSCSI storage and you can have a pretty sweet network running in a very small amount of rack space.

-RP

The Cisco SA 500 series comes in a variety of models, the SA 520, 520W and 540. The 520W is particularly nice because it provides built-in wireless functionality as well. The 540 is basically the version that supports the most throughput and is the higher end version of the bunch.

From using the SA 520, it is apparent from the start that it is meant to be user friendly. The entire device is configured via the GUI and there is no command line to worry aobut. If you just need a small appliance to drop into a very small business for basic Internet access and firewalling capability, this is a great solution. On top of all that it has VPN and VLAN support so you can do some business-like configuration of the device instead of just throwing in a home based router/firewall.

-RP

These switches are all manageable from GUI utilities without the need for CLI. They are also priced at a great price point for your SMB customers. A lot of times when I go into SMB clients the perception is that Cisco is expensive and they instead vote to go with a different company for their switching gear. Cisco has seen the light and is now offering cheaper product in this marketspace.

The ESW 500 series is available with gigabit capability and even POE! This makes it great for the SMB company that wants to implement VOIP and reap those benefits. Cisco needs to keep releasing SMB product like this, it really will make all the others stand up and take notice! You can read more about it here.

-RP

This series of switch is aimed at the SMB market that needs POE switching for voice and data for unified communications. More and more we are seeing companies requiring enterprise level equipment to facilitate unified communications in their SMB networks. This isn’t easy for these SMB companies because enterprise level equipment can get quite expensive. Cisco has seen this need and is now offering the necessary equipment to fulfill these needs at a lower price by offering “LAN Lite”.

You can read more about it and compare the different versions here at Cisco’s web site. You can also go here to this other link at Cisco’s web site to read more about their offer.

-RP

 One of my personal favourite VOIP solutions is Asterisk. Asterisk is an open source PBX which is in my opinion the most flexible non-proprietary piece of VOIP software out there. If you haven’t heard of it, or would like ot check it out, you can get more info here. With Asterisk you can take a call anywhere at anytime and you can even get your voice mail to show up in your e-mail inbox.

One of the things that is required in Unified Messaging is instant messaging(IM). If you are running an Asterisk VOIP system, one of the good IM solutions out there is Openfire and Spark. Openfire is the server side component and Spark is the IM client that runs on your user’s desktops. This server can be easily setup and integrated with Active Directory for Single Sign On (SSO) support. Then you can install the Asterisk component that allows it to integrate with your Asterisk VOIP system! Openfire server supports the open protocol called Jabber.

 All in all this is a great solution for SMB offices that don’t want to spend too much money on a VOIP system but still require all the features of one.

 -RP