Stop running your business on a server that stays in one room.
High availability, work-from-anywhere access, and a properly engineered private cloud — built on HP DL Gen11, Xeon Gold, SAN storage, and Microsoft licensing done right.
For businesses tired of aging on-prem servers, untested backups, surprise licence audits, and the cost of running infrastructure that isn't their core business.
Six things that will break before you're ready.
Most businesses run their accounting, payroll and operational software on servers in a back office or a converted store room. It works — until a drive fails on a Friday afternoon, a Microsoft audit lands, your business gets locked into one location, or a fire takes the lot. By then, the cost is never just the hardware.
Hardware End-of-Life
Servers older than 5 years are running on borrowed time. Drives fail. RAID controllers age out. Replacement parts get scarce. The day the server dies isn't a planned date — it's a Wednesday afternoon when nobody's ready.
Replacement: R200K+ · Downtime: per hourMicrosoft Licence Exposure
Wrong edition. Expired Software Assurance. Undocumented user counts. Most businesses are confidently non-compliant. A Microsoft audit isn't if, it's when.
Audit penalty: 200–300% of true-upUntested Backups
The backup runs every night. The restore has never been tested. The day you need it, you discover the tape's corrupt, the cloud sync broke 8 weeks ago, or the backup ran but excluded the database.
Lost data: irreplaceable · Trust: goneSingle Point of Failure
One server. One PSU. One UPS. One internet line. One air-conditioner. One key holder. When any one fails, the whole business stops. HA isn't a luxury for big companies — it's basic engineering hygiene.
Outage cost: 2–10× monthly licenceTied to One Location
Accountant works from home? They can't. Sales team on the road? They can't access live stock. A fire takes the office? The business stops until the building is rebuilt. "In the office or nowhere" ended in 2020.
Lost productivity · Lost talent · Lost agilityThe IT Skills Gap
Patching Windows, managing Hyper-V, sizing storage, monitoring backups, troubleshooting Pastel — that's a senior IT engineer's job. Most SMBs don't have one. The ones that do, can't afford to lose them.
Senior IT: R600K+/year · Single-person riskEnterprise hardware, per-customer engineered.
Every workload we host runs on properly specified enterprise infrastructure — not consumer hardware sold as enterprise, not refurbished kit sold as new. The same gear we'd build for ourselves.
HP ProLiant DL Gen11
Current-generation enterprise rack servers built for virtualisation density. Industry-standard, vendor-supported, properly speced for production workloads.
- Current Gen11 generation hardware
- Vendor warranty & spares supply
- iLO management for remote response
- Hot-swappable PSUs & storage
Intel Xeon Gold Series
Xeon Gold CPUs — enterprise-grade silicon engineered for sustained, multi-tenant workloads. Higher core count, larger cache, ECC memory paths.
- Xeon Gold series CPUs
- Sustained workload tolerance
- ECC memory throughout
- Right-sized per customer payload
Enterprise SAN Array
Storage Area Network architecture — separated from compute, redundant by design, high IOPS for database workloads. Real protection against hardware failure.
- Dedicated SAN architecture
- Redundant disk arrays
- High IOPS for SQL workloads
- Snapshot-capable at the storage layer
Microsoft Licensed Partner
Windows Server, SQL Server, RDS CALs — all properly licensed under our Microsoft partnership. You don't track licences. You don't worry about audits. Compliance is a service we deliver.
- Licensed Microsoft partnership
- Windows Server & SQL included
- RDS CALs as required
- Compliance documentation on request
Your line-of-business stack — properly virtualised.
From accounting to payroll, from custom-built ERPs to file shares, from SQL databases to remote desktop hosts — if it runs on Windows Server, it runs in our private cloud. We size each VM to the workload, isolate per customer, and keep the licensing right.
Pastel Payroll
Full Pastel Payroll deployments hosted per customer — multi-user, multi-company, per-user CALs included. Month-end runs that don't crash.
Pastel Accounting
Pastel Partner, Xpress, Evolution — all hosted on dedicated Windows Server environments. SQL backend properly sized. Real-time access from anywhere.
Custom Servers
Industry-specific apps, line-of-business systems, in-house developed software. We host the legacy stack alongside the modern one.
Remote Desktop Services
RDS host environments for users to log in from anywhere. Centralised application delivery. Office, line-of-business apps, secure data.
SQL Server Databases
SQL Standard and SQL Express deployments, sized to workload. Microsoft-licensed properly. Performance-monitored, not just provisioned.
File Servers & Shares
Centralised file storage with proper permissions, version-aware, backed up to snapshots. Every file lives in one secure place.
Active Directory
Domain controller environments hosted in our cloud — central user management, group policies, single sign-on. Your domain, our infrastructure.
Web & App Servers
IIS, .NET application hosts, internal web apps, intranets. Locked down to your private network. Performance-monitored, patched.
P2V Migrations
Physical-to-virtual migrations from your existing servers. We capture, convert, validate side-by-side, and only cut over once it's tested green.
Restore to the last thirty minutes.
Most backup strategies are last-night-at-best. Ours captures incremental snapshots every 30 minutes, kept on dedicated storage, restorable to the moment a payroll run completed, a journal posted, or a database transaction committed.
Application-centric
Pastel runs a different snapshot rhythm than a file server. SQL hosts run more often than RDS hosts. We tune the schedule to the application, not a one-size-fits-all rule.
Incremental
Only the changed blocks are captured each cycle — tiny, fast, low-impact on the running workload. The first snapshot is the full one; every snapshot after is just the delta.
Tested restore
A backup that's never been restored is a hope, not a strategy. We test restore procedures regularly — and we'll prove a recoverable restore for your environment during onboarding.
Backup is theatre. Tested restore is engineering. We do the second one. — The Swiss Systems Private Cloud Promise
Move from a dying server to a properly engineered one.
P2V — Physical to Virtual — is what we do all day. We capture the running workload from your existing on-prem server, convert it to a VM, validate it side-by-side with the original, and only cut over once you've confirmed it's working. No rebuild from scratch. No reinstalled apps. No reconfigured users.
Your physical server today
- Hardware ageing, warranty expired
- Backup runs but never tested
- Office-only access, no remote
- Patches applied "when there's time"
- Single point of failure for the whole business
- Microsoft licences in a drawer somewhere
Your virtual machine, hosted
- Enterprise-grade host hardware
- 30-minute snapshots, tested
- RDS / VPN access from anywhere
- Patching managed continuously
- HA cluster — host failure is invisible
- Microsoft licensing included & compliant
We don't engineer to upsell.
Many hosting providers have an unspoken business model: under-spec the customer, then throttle the VM until they have to upgrade. We refuse to play that game. We size workloads honestly, monitor utilisation transparently, and engage with you about right-sizing — not to chase an upgrade, but to make sure the workload runs the way it should.
Throttle to upsell
Customer signs up on a small package. Workload grows. Provider's hypervisor quietly throttles CPU/RAM/IOPS. Customer experience degrades. Provider then "discovers" the customer needs an upgrade. Repeat every 6 months.
Result: customer always 20% under-provisioned
Honest sizing, honest engagement
We size correctly at the start. We monitor utilisation transparently. If a workload genuinely needs more, we tell you with the data. If usage trends suggest right-sizing down, we tell you that too — even if it means lower revenue for us.
Result: customer pays for what they actually use
One number. No surprises.
Most hosting deals look cheap on the front page and expensive on the invoice. Swiss Systems pricing is per-VM, per-month, fully inclusive. Hardware, hypervisor, Microsoft licences, storage, snapshots, support, monitoring, and the SLA — all in.
| What you get | Swiss Systems | Self-Hosted / Other |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise host hardware (HP DL Gen11, Xeon Gold) | ✓ | Capex R200K+ |
| SAN storage (high IOPS, redundant) | ✓ | Capex R150K+ |
| Hypervisor licensing (Hyper-V / VMware) | ✓ | Separate licence |
| Windows Server licensing | ✓ | Separate licence |
| SQL Server licensing (where required) | ✓ | Per-core licence |
| RDS CALs (per user) | ✓ | Separate purchase |
| 30-minute incremental snapshots | ✓ | Often optional |
| Tested restore procedures | ✓ | Customer responsibility |
| HA cluster (high availability) | ✓ | Capex + service |
| Patching, monitoring, security hardening | ✓ | IT staff time |
| P2V migration assistance | ✓ | Project cost |
| Microsoft compliance documentation | ✓ | Self-managed |
| 99.9% uptime SLA | ✓ | Best-effort |
From your office to ours, in weeks.
Moving infrastructure feels scary. Done badly, it is. Done properly, it's a series of small, scheduled, reversible steps — with parallel running so your existing system stays live until the new one's proven. Most P2V migrations land within 3–4 weeks from kick-off.
Discovery & Sizing
We assess your current servers, applications, user counts, performance profile, and licensing posture.
Provisioning
VMs provisioned in our private cloud — Windows Server installed, networking configured, SAN storage allocated.
P2V & Parallel Run
Physical servers captured and converted to VMs. Side-by-side validation. No surprises.
Cutover & Hand-Hold
Scheduled cutover with rollback path. Old physical environment kept read-only for 30 days. Onsite support week 1 post-cutover.
Move your servers to a proper home.
Book a 30-minute discovery call or come visit the data centre yourself. We'll walk you through the infrastructure, the licensing model, the migration plan, and the real per-VM number — without the sales theatre.
Enterprise engineering
HP DL Gen11. Xeon Gold. SAN. HA cluster. 30-min snapshots. Spec sheets you can verify, infrastructure you can tour.
Licensing & compliance
Microsoft Partner. Licences carried. Compliance documented. Audit-defensible from day one, not at year-end.
Honest sizing
No throttle to upsell. No engineered scarcity. We size correctly, monitor transparently, engage when sizing should change.