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This imposes operational restrictions on such businesses - and servers fall firmly in this category. The benefits of server deployment include centralisation of data, employee collaboration and remote access to data and applications. However WD has effectively dismantled this barrier to server adoption with its WD Sentinel DS6100 offering.

Apart from scale, the application and storage requirements of organisations large and small are similar, but for smaller organisations, cost and technical complexity can put servers out of reach. The DS6100 from WD meets this challenge head on, offering organisations an effective, affordable, and easy to implement route to their first server. Pre-built with Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, it is small, powerful and impressive. With the DS6100, WD has radically minimised server set-up and redefined out-of-the-box: ours was configured and working in around 30 minutes.

The DS6100 boasts impressive standard features, including two OS boot drives for resilience and four 3.5-inch drive bays with 16TB capacity, using four WD 4TB Se enterprise drives. There is an Intel quad core Xeon processor, 16GB of ECC RAM, expandable to 32 GB, dual redundant external power supplies, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, and six USB ports offering USB 3.0 and USB 2.0.

The dual boot drives are pre-configured in RAID 1: the data drives can be configured as JBOD or RAID (0, 1, 5, and 10). With Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials OS pre-loaded it provides Active Directory administration, Remote Web Access, VPN Compatibility and iSCSI. We configured the DS6100, which must be the Primary Domain Controller, using a hardware RAID storage configuration, but the in-built MS Storage Spaces offers software RAID if preferred.

This highly capable storage server can run an organisation's line-of-business software applications and will be very at home in an organisation of up to 25 seats. Designed to be an organisation's first server deployment, it provides support for 25 users and bare metal Windows client backup for 50 devices. Future proofing is covered as well because the OS can be transitioned to Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard by purchasing the necessary licenses. The Windows Server software offers an impressive list of supported line-of-business applications and services, including Office 365 integration and SAGE Accounting. This is no compromise.

From the set-up screen, we determined the update process for both WD and MS software and created user accounts, server folders and shares. We were also able to configure external access, using HTTPS and client connections. We used a laptop for our Client which installed a small connection agent showing four options (permission dependant), and of course Windows Explorer offers the familiar folders and share view. Group Policy can be implemented from the server to set up user and distribution groups.

Using the Essentials interface, a few tabs navigate you to a lot of well organised options: mostly, these can tolerate post installation attention as they represent management and fine tuning options. As you would expect, you can set up quotas and implement them elegantly with firm limits or some practical flexibility. Equally, from the health monitoring tab you can view warnings and set up alerts. Fan speeds, various temperature measurements and health reports are also available.

In summary then; a lot of small businesses are serious players in their chosen market, but are often impeded by the complexity of Enterprise scale solutions, and especially servers. The DS6100 brings impressive server and storage capability without the fuss and complexity that many businesses just cannot accommodate.

Product: WD Sentinel DS6100 Windows Server
Supplier: WD
Tel: 01372 366 000
Web site: www.wdc.com
Price: From £2,129 excluding VAT