I am considering a dedicated back-up server to protect data for my small business, but I would like to have several DVDs in the server and want to be able to retrieve information off those DVDs. It would also be convenient to my business to have some programs on one central machine that several could run on their local machines so as to keep one central database. I have an old computer that I am considering turning into a server. Do I need server software to do these things, or will Windows XP work fine? If I need special software for the server, what should I use?

What are you using the DVDs for? Are you planning on writing the backups to the DVDs or are these the DVDs for software (or movies)? If you're planning on writing your backups to the DVDs then that's probably not the best route to go.

One way to share the DVDs might be to just copy the contents of the DVDs over to the hard drive. Another route might be to copy an ISO image of the DVDs to the hard drive and then mount them using something like DAEMON Tools. Either way the performance is probably not going to be too great for multiple computers accessing the files at once. Using an actual DVD drive will be even slower and as someone else said use up all of your drive bays in the case.

You wouldn't necessarily need to have the programs running off of the centeral server, just have everyone store their data files to the server where everyone else can get at them. This is really going to depend on the software you're using some software will support running off of a central server while other software won't.