The following article written by blogger Eric Langley is a compelling argument for why there is no better time to take that first step on your cloud journey. Following the article see how eGroup can make the BSOD a thing of the past.<!--more-->

<em>Disaster Story: Small Business Server 2008 Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)</em>

<em>“Windows Small Business Server is a great value. There’s no denying that. It comes with Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. Purchasing those programs separately would cost much more than the relatively inexpensive SBS bundle. However, SBS does have it’s drawbacks.</em>

<em>1) All of your eggs are in one basket. If that basket falls on the floor all of your eggs break – at the same time.</em>

<em>2) You can’t have an additional Domain Controller so there is no way to restore your domain (or even log into it) other than rebuilding a failed SBS machine.</em>

<em>3) It’s very difficult to migrate to new servers or upgrade SBS.
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<em>Here’s this week’s Disaster Story with a Small Business Server (edited for clarity)</em>

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<em>“I had a blue screen which I wasn’t able to fix in our SBS 2008 after a power failure and after some time and a lot of stress from the management, I sort of panicked and in the SBS DVD I chose the repair function and did a full system [restore from] back-up [that] I thought was the raid (the only one I could see) from the 30th of November at 02.00. As everything was chaotic I didn’t wonder why there was only one back-up possibility. What I didn’t see was that the back-up was from the 30th of November 2009... I know...unforgiveable. But now its done...</em>

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<em>Is there any way one can roll back such a back-up - which has turned out to be a regular disaster as lots of mails and documents in the sharepoint now are lost? Ah and worst of all is that the back-up doesn’t work, but only gives me another blue screen with 0x00000058 so I am only able to access the disks via DOS. Any help will be highly appreciated.”</em>

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<em>This is a very sad story. Mostly because there was probably nothing wrong with the hard disks and data. Typically a BSOD has something to do with the hardware, maybe the motherboard or memory. The best thing you can do in a case like this is take a complete image of the disks before doing anything else. That way you have a place to go back to if necessary, as in this case.</em>

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<em>This story really shows the needs for good backups, verification and the need for server disaster recovery. In this case the easy thing to do would have been to simply switch over to the standby failover server and go about your business as normal. Then you can take your time to find out why this machine has died.</em>

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<em>Too expensive to have a failover server you say? Not in this case.”</em>

If you are going to keep all of your eggs in one basket, I recommend you consider one built by eGroup.
Our highly available, redundant, virtual solutions for Small and Medium businesses will put an end to the blue screen without putting an end to your budget. Virtualization leaders VMware and Veeam now offer competitively priced SMB bundles which makes you a serious competitor at a reasonable price.

VMware Essentials Plus offers:
• High Availability
• Data Recovery
• On the fly migration of live VM’s from one host to another (vMotion)

Veeam Essentials complements VMware’s offering with:
• 2-in-1: backup and replication
• Performance monitoring and alerting
• 24x7 monitoring and alerting and a comprehensive, performance-oriented view of your virtual infrastructure that complements vCenter Server

Your business can now compete all day, every day. No downtime. No loss of productivity. All for the price of 2 new servers. Furthermore, consolidating your physical server environment into a virtual environment effectively ends the days of purchasing additional severs. As your business grows so does the virtual environment, adding new machines is as simple as a few clicks of the mouse. Getting started is a lot easier than you think and eGroup will be happy to assist you in taking that first step to your very own private cloud.