What Are You Doing Right Now
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@Dashrender said:
This seems like a muddying of the water again - you're willing to listen to these resellers about what parts work together - that demands a level of trust that I thought you were against (and one I've found not to be overly true, at least with CDW). You are allowing them to change your configuration once you are taking advice from them on what parts work together.
Remember, I DO trust them. I've never not trusted them. Maybe not CDW, I don't work with them. But I trust our partners like CDW that I do work with. Softmart, in our example, or Dell directly or xByte, etc. They test parts, know which parts are certified, etc. This is what I am very much FOR.
I keep saying that I trust sales people and feel that they are a critical part of the process. But for doing things like this, not for doing the IT work instead of the IT people, that's what consultants are for.
Let's use a car example.
I know I need transportation. I need to get to work every day. So I go to a transportation consultant. That person tells me I need to drive as there is no bus where I need to go and I'd have to walk eight miles a day and the weather is often bad. So, I need a car. He looks at my needs and determines that a Ford Focus is right for me. Right safety, cost, maintainability, etc.
Now I know what car to buy. Time to go talk to the salesman.
I go to my Ford dealer. The salesman let's me test drive the Focus and asks me what options that I want. I tell him the things I want and he tells me which packages are available that have those options. I say I want a blue one. He checks inventory and tells me what blue ones are available versus which ones have the packages that I want. I select some special wheels. he tells me that those don't fit my car but shows me similar ones that they have that will fit my car. he provides information as to delivery date.
The consultant provide the macro details going from business need or goal down to the design. The VAR provides the final tweaking inside of the solution set for details specific to the products in question.
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@Dashrender said:
Here's an example - I need a RAID card that supports RAID XYZ with 8 GB cache. If I don't tell the reseller the exact card I want (through my research) why should I trust them to sell me the least expensive card that gives me what I need instead of the most expensive?
I'm sure we could find examples all day that go in different directions but here is my take on this specific one...
A RAID card is a non-trivial component and you need to consider the full field of options (which is not very big.) You want to make sure that you have a good feel that nothing is being missed. Now, in reality, if you don't know which card to buy chances are you need a consultant for more than just deciding which card, but that is another issue. But you need a product agnostic viewpoint. Once the exact or "essentially" exact card is selected by the IT people (you and/or the consultant) then you would use the sales person to determine the price of the card. If you are okay with multiple cards, you can ask for a price on several but this is not something you would typically do with RAID cards, you need the right one not "any" one. not just what is on sale.
So this is not something you would trust to a reseller, especially because it is unlikely that the reseller carries all reasonable options.
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@dafyre said:
Right. This is why doing your own research is necessary. After you have been present with options from a sales rep. Especially on software. "We need somee Image editing software." Bam! Quote for Photoshop. Further research reveals Gimp. "What about Gimp?" "Oh, hey, this will do most of what we need, let's not buy Photoshop, yet."
That works in some cases. But in an example where it does work, like this one, where does the sales person help? You could have a Google result leading you to Photoshop AND GIMP faster than you could dial a sales person on the phone or send an email. That the sales person can tell you the name of a photo editing application isn't really useful. Basically you are just having them Google a product name for you. If you know enough to know you need image editing, the sales person is already just "in the way." But by using them like this not only are you wasting your time but theirs as well which won't lead to the best long term relationship.
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tl;dr
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It's 11.30pm here, 28C and humid. Yuck.
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@dafyre said:
DAY 4
- All vendors see similar margin ratios. This is a well known issue. No matter how many vendors you talk to they will always push SAN-based IPODs. The process of asking vendors for IT advice is what created the IPOD in the first place as it is the cheapest way to sell a SAN which has the highest margins. They all did it and millions of companies that were doing exactly this process fell victim to this design because it is the natural result of combining sales people giving advice, no IT checks and balances and the nature of storage margins. It is also what pushed RAID 5, all based on sales margins.
I don't argue that this is generally the case. We saw this happen when we were trying to purchase our storage setup. The question that we (the IT Team) kept coming back to "What happens if SAN 1 fails?" We asked the storage vendors we were speaking to about this, and two of them were like "you replicate from SAN1 to SAN2"... We liked the HP guys because they were the first one that told us that theirs was an active/passive cluster. No down time if SAN1 fails because SAN2 would automatically take over with no down time... Sadly, we did have to test this scenario several times, and (not so sadly) it worked beautifully.
That part is great. But where the issue comes in is that no one in the chain will ever step back and say "what about not having the SAN at all?" SAN is great in the right use cases, so maybe it was right here. But as everyone in the chain was paid by selling SANs, they answers were going to always be based around the assumption that a SAN was going to be purchased.
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@dafyre said:
This is why you ask for options, not promotions. Granted, it should be expected that you the get high margin promotions first -- after all the sales rep needs to eat too. But those can be easily tossed aside as outside of your budget range or not the product you are looking for after you do your own research.
Doesn't work that way, though. The promotions are to them, not to you. They get special kickbacks for pushing certain products. That's why one day the VAR will be all about Watchguard firewalls and the next day all about SonicWall. If you are just requesting a price, you don't need the sales person. If you are asking for anything more than a price, you are being guided by the promotions but will never be told about them.
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Have a good day people....
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Minion-Queen said:
Have a good day people....
have fun storming the castle.
Do you think they'll make it?
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Much panic, very despiration, wow:
Cloud At Cost System Message:01/06/2016 01:25 PM
CloudAtCost is planning on deploying servers in 20 Datacenters across Canada and the US. Where should we start?
Vote Here: <link removed>
Is it just me or does ^that sound a lot like the "We're goin' down! Make it look like we're afloat still" that all the shonky shops do right before they disappear off the face of the planet? -
@scottalanmiller Good talking to you the other day
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@dahlinme said:
@scottalanmiller Good talking to you the other day
You too! And welcome to the party!
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So we had a VERY successful shopping trip today. We managed to get groceries AND the power adapters that we needed. We are SO excited. What a difference this is going to make.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
DAY 4
- All vendors see similar margin ratios. This is a well known issue. No matter how many vendors you talk to they will always push SAN-based IPODs. The process of asking vendors for IT advice is what created the IPOD in the first place as it is the cheapest way to sell a SAN which has the highest margins. They all did it and millions of companies that were doing exactly this process fell victim to this design because it is the natural result of combining sales people giving advice, no IT checks and balances and the nature of storage margins. It is also what pushed RAID 5, all based on sales margins.
I don't argue that this is generally the case. We saw this happen when we were trying to purchase our storage setup. The question that we (the IT Team) kept coming back to "What happens if SAN 1 fails?" We asked the storage vendors we were speaking to about this, and two of them were like "you replicate from SAN1 to SAN2"... We liked the HP guys because they were the first one that told us that theirs was an active/passive cluster. No down time if SAN1 fails because SAN2 would automatically take over with no down time... Sadly, we did have to test this scenario several times, and (not so sadly) it worked beautifully.
That part is great. But where the issue comes in is that no one in the chain will ever step back and say "what about not having the SAN at all?" SAN is great in the right use cases, so maybe it was right here. But as everyone in the chain was paid by selling SANs, they answers were going to always be based around the assumption that a SAN was going to be purchased.
In this case not having a SAN did not fit the business goal that we were mandated with. Keep our files up and working, even if the main server building burns down with as little down time as possible. That was our business mandate. (This happened due to a couple of issues beyond our control becoming a major panic point of the administration at the time) Backups are great to have, but at the time, that was not the business goal (we still had them of course!). That is the largest reason why we did not back away from the SAN idea.
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@scottalanmiller said:
So we had a VERY successful shopping trip today. We managed to get groceries AND the power adapters that we needed. We are SO excited. What a difference this is going to make.
Food is kinda nice... but so is being able to charge your portable stuff too, ha ha ha!
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So things you don't get to see every day.... NATO bombing squadron taking off. We don't know the details, but when a NATO base spends twenty minutes launching planes that shake the island and they circle around and fly off straight at Syria... you can guess.
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@scottalanmiller said:
OMG... I swear the people over there are freaking incompetent... the number of people on SW that just "fear" anything virtual, hosted or remote is crazy.
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1374462-starting-over-do-i-need-avtive-directory
It should be worth noting that "avoiding the MS train" is not a business decision. Yes you can build a comprable suite of tools completely open source and free, but how long will that take, and how much work to maintain in that fairly small environment? Would that choice help or hurt the businessbin the long run? Prepare proposals both ways, then let the management make that decision.
It can be done in less time, less resources, and less management. It's like people think you need to compile every program that you run in Linux and then manually patch upgrades in config files by comparing with diff.
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@dafyre said:
In this case not having a SAN did not fit the business goal that we were mandated with. Keep our files up and working, even if the main server building burns down with as little down time as possible. That was our business mandate.
But SAN doesn't enable that in any specific way. SAN actually makes that worse and then you have to mitigate the servers risk AND the new SAN risk that was just added. You can have SAN in this setup, but the SAN can't be part of the solution. But it is standard for sales people to act so convincingly like it is that most companies believe it and buy the SAN anyway. SAN has only one purpose and that is cost savings at scale despite the added risks that it brings. SAN can be part of an HA strategy, but SAN itself lowers the availability rather than raising it. You can always do even higher availability without the SAN.
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@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
So we had a VERY successful shopping trip today. We managed to get groceries AND the power adapters that we needed. We are SO excited. What a difference this is going to make.
Food is kinda nice... but so is being able to charge your portable stuff too, ha ha ha!
We were on four days of lentils already!
