Servers

Tower Server

Ideal for SOHO/SMB

A tower server is designed to sit under a desk and is built to work in an environment without air conditioning — ideal when a rack cabinet isn't required.

Whilst not as powerful as rackmount or blade servers, tower servers are easy to deploy and perfect for printing or file serving in an office. You get the reliability you'd expect from the data centre, delivered in a package optimised for office environments. They're also relatively quiet, given where they're typically used and deployed.

Tower Server Design

A tower server, like a rack mount server, has redundant fans and power supplies as well as hot-swap drive bays. The network, graphics and storage controllers are normally mounted directly on the motherboard in a PCIe slot. Rackmount kits are also available to mount tower servers in racks later, if requirements change.

Advantages of a Tower Server

Below are some of the advantages of using a tower server:

Flexible — Designed for use in shops or offices where there isn't enough space for a rack or air conditioning.

Storage Capacity — Some tower servers can now support 32 drives within a single chassis, making them ideal for applications such as a small branch office virtual machine host or high-capacity NAS.

Multiple Processor Support — Tower servers are normally supplied with a single or dual CPU processors, along with support for up to 1.5TB of memory.

Adaptable — With increased CPU processing, data storage, memory, GPU and network connectivity, a tower server could replace a NAS or act as the office VM server.

Application Use Cases

Virtualisation — running VMs for applications, or acting as the office VM server
Database servers
File servers
Mail servers
Print servers
Web servers
Application servers

Limitations of Using a Tower Server

A tower server has many benefits over blade servers, but there are some limitations to be aware of when specifying one for your environment.

[Content note: the original page promised a list of limitations here but none were actually written — worth adding a genuine limitations list rather than leaving this section incomplete.]

If you need some guidance in choosing a suitable tower server for your requirement or application, we're here to help.

Not sure if a tower server is right for your office environment? Talk to us for free, no-obligation advice.

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