Building a 'Quickbooks Server' Server From Scratch

Before starting MAcarbon back in 2004, I spent ten years as an IT consultant. It used to be after a day of IT work, I'd sit down with a good car magazine. Now, after a day of playing with Ferrari carbon parts, I tend to scratch the 'computer' itch by daydreaming which new laptop I'd like to upgrade to.

The last few weeks, I've been amusing myself with a new computer project. And I figured I'd share it here in the technology section. Maybe get some advice as well!

Like many small businesses, MAcarbon relies on Intuit's Quickbooks for our accounting software. Its a love/hate relationship to be sure but its what we depend on it every day. We have four concurrent users who are on it all the time. We use QB Premier Wholesale & Manufacturing. We don't use Ituit's online product as it doesn't have everything we need... and is expensive!

A cool new feature in QB2012 was the ability to view the full customer account from the invoice, sales order, etc. Lately, I'd been getting annoyed with how long it was taking for that data to show. So.... opportunity to put on the IT hat!

We're currently running the shared database on an old Lenovo t400s laptop (QB is not particular!) so I've decided to throw some new hardware at the problem. I went to google and found... nothing. There is not much out there on recommendations for a QB Server - probably because it can run on anything. We could just go out and buy an i7 desktop or something, but what would the fun be in that?

So we're going to roll our own!

As most of our other applications are hosted, we don't have anything else to run on this machine. So it will be QB exclusive.

Goals for the project are:
- Energy efficient (it will spend a good chunk of time idle)
- FAST!
- Small form factor (want something small to take up as little room as possible)
- Low cost (we'll see!)
- Use some of the spare stuff we have at the shop (SSDs, OS etc)

Hardware is showing up this week... so updates to come pretty quick! Hopefully this isn't too geeky for Fchat. And hopefully there are some other QB customers who can benefit.