Thanks everyone for the comments,
I can see the benefits of server grade over consumer grade, but as far as parts availability. I can drive down to our local computer supplier and buy any consumer part needed and be back in the office in an hour if It dies in most cases.
Our sever does have dual power supplies, on separate UPS’s. I’m tempted to run it out of the 3 year warranty for another year as it still has the resources we need. In my view, just because its our of warranty, doesn’t mean its not reliable. Our MSP has our VM’s backup ed up locally and remotely, and for a nice fee, will drop off and setup a loaner server next day.
As for the server replacement, from what I can tell, when I priced it out using dell’s website for comparison its about $8K CND… $3.5K of which is just new SSD’s.
The more and more I think about it, I think as an MSP, they are doing the right thing (although I need to revisit the server pricing issue). Recommend a product that will be reliable… and since we pay a set fee per month, will be less work for them to keep up.
But, if we run our server out of warranty, we increase the chance of a day or two of downtime while our MSP gets us a loaner sever set up (I know we would pay for the rental/setup) while our new one is on order.
There is a part of me that wants to see if I can take on migrating the old server to the new server for the experience (again, hobby), cant be that hard… Just need to watch a few you tube video’s and I will be good to go!