Local teams serve Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary. Call (604) 813-7881 for a free consult with Tony. No pressure, no jargon.
Open Dental IT support for dental clinics
Open Dental on a setup built to last
We build the environment around Open Dental for where your clinic is going, not the least it can get by on.
The setup we build
Clinics grow, and one-off setups get outgrown. This foundation is built to grow with you, and one team looks after all of it.
- Hyper-V, not bare metal. Your server runs as a virtual machine on a Hyper-V host, so it can be backed up whole and restored on other hardware. Most practice software works on a VM, and we confirm your version first.
- RAID 10 storage, our recommendation. Fast disks that keep working if a drive fails. RAID 6 is the budget option.
- Gigabit, wired. 1GbE is the standard baseline: cabling to the server and every workstation, with no Wi-Fi for practice computers. Have a CBCT? Consider 10GbE for smooth image loading.
- Room to grow. Free disk space, capacity for more operatories, and images that keep getting bigger. We never build to the vendor’s bare minimum.
- Planned changes. Every upgrade has a written plan, a tested backup and a short lived checkpoint taken just before the change, so there’s a planned way back.
Open Dental is server based, with a database and a separate image folder. Both go into the backup. We’re independent IT support, not the Open Dental vendor.
Everything tied to one box
If the hardware fails, everything on it stops with it.
Whole machines you can move
Back up the whole server and restore it on other hardware.
Run like a proper IT shop
- Incidents. Every problem is logged, ranked and closed with your office manager, then reviewed so it doesn’t repeat.
- Monitoring. We watch the server, storage and backups, and act early. Backups follow 3-2-1, with restores tested.
Why it matters, in plain words
The tech behind this page, and why it’s there. See all the plain guides.
Hyper-V
Why one dead server shouldn’t stop the clinic
On Hyper-V, the server is a set of files that can come back on other hardware. Restores from local storage have taken less than 2 hours.
Immutable backups
Why ransomware goes after the clinic’s backups first
Without backups, the clinic has to pay or rebuild. Our copies are locked for 30 days, and no one, not even us, can delete them early.
RAID 10
Why two healthy drives still aren’t a backup
RAID 10 keeps the server running when a drive dies. It also copies a mistake or ransomware to every drive instantly.
Open Dental questions
Why Hyper-V and not a regular server?
A Hyper-V server is a whole computer kept as a file. We can take a short lived checkpoint before a change, back it up whole and restore it on other hardware. A checkpoint isn’t a backup. Open Dental can run on a Windows virtual machine.
Can you upgrade or move Open Dental?
Yes, as a planned change: agree it, back up, test, then go live or go back. See the conversion matrix for moves.