Why Hyperconverged For Small Business
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Needing an MSP is 100% the way that any company under thousands of employees with a huge IT investment should run. You need a minimal amount of dedicated skills, and a really broad range of skills to be able to handle basic stuff.
For example.... it takes a minimum of three staff just to cover phones on a normal helpdesk, not even to have skills. To be able to support what you have today, you need Windows, ESXi, and some app skills plus networking and security. Just at a minimum from what we know.
But to make proper decisions about your needs, you need loads and loads of operating system, platform / hypervisor, networking, vendor, supply chain, ERP and other skills across a huge range so that decisions like what architecture should you use, backup and restore plans, performance, OS design, application management, patching, high availability needs, blah blah blah can be done. No VAR (easily literally none) has those skills and even if they were able to have them, they'd never let you talk to them because they'd constantly stop you from spending so much money.
NOthing will come close to being as cheap as having a good MSP. They will meet or beat any possibly in house IT cost and do so with a potential for more longevity and stability. Finding a good MSP is really hard, but so is finding a good employee. You can't just hire anyone and you can't just hire any MSP. You have to check why they make sense. Are they big enough to have the range of skills and support you need today (AND for the future.) Are they stable? Do they have a reputation to put at risk? Are they fly by night or established? Are they a professional MSP or just some guys who say that they are an MSP while being out of work because they are otherwise unemployable? Are they not even an MSP at all (or even IT guys) and just sales guys masquerading as IT because they know that it is easy to dupe customers?
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
For example.... it takes a minimum of three staff just to cover phones on a normal helpdesk, not even to have skills
Not to take away from the topic, but here we have a full total IT Department of seven.
Director; Infrustructer Engineer; EMR Analyst; IT Lead / Generalist; and three IT Generalists.
The four of us are split between
Service desk (phones), Break Fix, Projects which include every facet of the company. Some days we really need more staff due to the projects... Like the phones, Active Directory rebuild, ... -
@gjacobse said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
Director; Infrustructer Engineer; EMR Analyst; IT Lead / Generalist; and three IT Generalists.
And in that you have a manager and the EMR Analyst isn't likely IT. So you have four generalists and an Infrastructure Engineer.
So who has the deep systems skills, the platform skills, the networking skills... it's only generalists. And IE is a silly term... that's just a more senior generalist without networking. I wouldn't call it a full team. It's more like "good and highly costly internal coverage for day to day stuff with little or no consideration for the skills necessary for critical decision making."
The reason that those skills are lacking is because there is no way to be current or have experience. Even your senior people are in a tiny environment with no peers and have to make decisions only once a decade or so, likely making an entire career at the company in between major decision processes. So they never, ever get to flex the muscles that are must important for their jobs. So everything outside of mundane day to day is likely either being outsourced or overlooked. And that's how companies get really screwed. The day to day work is the easy part.
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@gjacobse said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
Not to take away from the topic, but here we have a full total IT Department of seven.
Director; Infrustructer Engineer; EMR Analyst; IT Lead / Generalist; and three IT Generalists.Big questions that have to come up from an IT management perspective...
- How do you justify the time and cost of a director, and keep them interested, when they are managing just three people (direct) with three indirect reports? That's so tiny, there's no need for a manager at that size. What value is the director adding?
- How much infrastructure is there to keep an engineer busy? What do they do all day?
- Four generalists feels like a bit much with no structure. Typically already by that size you have people with different skills or levels so that you can break up who is working on printers vs. who is doing tough troubleshooting.
Basically it feels overloading and lopsided. Enough people and management to support thousands of users. But no allowance for the key skills that would be the differentiators to the company.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
@gjacobse said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
Not to take away from the topic, but here we have a full total IT Department of seven.
Director; Infrustructer Engineer; EMR Analyst; IT Lead / Generalist; and three IT Generalists.Big questions that have to come up from an IT management perspective...
- How do you justify the time and cost of a director, and keep them interested, when they are managing just three people (direct) with three indirect reports? That's so tiny, there's no need for a manager at that size. What value is the director adding?
- How much infrastructure is there to keep an engineer busy? What do they do all day?
- Four generalists feels like a bit much with no structure. Typically already by that size you have people with different skills or levels so that you can break up who is working on printers vs. who is doing tough troubleshooting.
Basically it feels overloading and lopsided. Enough people and management to support thousands of users. But no allowance for the key skills that would be the differentiators to the company.
- Well of course I don't / can't answer that but so well. The six of us report to him.
- We have sixty 'servers' fifteen of which are RDS for the EMR (no - please don't asked. It'll just give me another headache. @Dashrender uses basically the same EMR only direct and doesn't have the bloat we do). Additionally we have four primary offices and ten satillite offices in schools. Also have two pharmacy offices, and a two chair mobile dental bus.
- The four of us 'grunts' deal with all the day today stuff including installing toner at two offices (uhm, again - please don't ask.) ADUC is a mess and that's a project, we have nearly a hundred printers which includes some forty-five Zebra printers. We are replacing some lease printers with new cloud print Lexmark (Follow You type system) which has seen set backs due to product availablity as well as integration issues.
I'd wager a guess that if you 'toured' our network and work flows you would laugh until you decided to retire and move back to the US.....
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
@gjacobse said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
Not to take away from the topic, but here we have a full total IT Department of seven.
Director; Infrustructer Engineer; EMR Analyst; IT Lead / Generalist; and three IT Generalists.Big questions that have to come up from an IT management perspective...
- How do you justify the time and cost of a director, and keep them interested, when they are managing just three people (direct) with three indirect reports? That's so tiny, there's no need for a manager at that size. What value is the director adding?
- How much infrastructure is there to keep an engineer busy? What do they do all day?
- Four generalists feels like a bit much with no structure. Typically already by that size you have people with different skills or levels so that you can break up who is working on printers vs. who is doing tough troubleshooting.
Basically it feels overloading and lopsided. Enough people and management to support thousands of users. But no allowance for the key skills that would be the differentiators to the company.
Chances are he's a Director in name only.
Good question on the infrastructure person. -
@gjacobse said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
We have sixty 'servers' fifteen of which are RDS for the EMR (no - please don't asked. It'll just give me another headache. @Dashrender uses basically the same EMR only direct and doesn't have the bloat we do). Additionally we have four primary offices and ten satillite offices in schools. Also have two pharmacy offices, and a two chair mobile dental bus.
Good engineers are typically measured at 30 servers for the most junior of staff or troublesome workload, with good seniors more like 100 servers per engineer and top engineers around 600 unless you have state machines and IaC, then the numbers are thousands or tens of thousands. But for snowflakes like this, this means you have a full time person with the workload that isn't too bad. But there's no one else with his role, so he appears to have no peer support and no backup. Having only one person in a critical role implies that the company sees the role as having no value... yet willing to pay 2x-10x the cost that it should be for the support. Super weird.
What if he is sick or done for the day or on vacation? Those servers don't need support?
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
Good engineers are typically measured at 30 servers for the most junior of staff or troublesome workload, with good seniors more like 100 servers per engineer and top engineers around 600 unless you have state machines and IaC, then the numbers are thousands or tens of thousands.
What do you define as "server" in this context? OS installations?
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@pete-s said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
Good engineers are typically measured at 30 servers for the most junior of staff or troublesome workload, with good seniors more like 100 servers per engineer and top engineers around 600 unless you have state machines and IaC, then the numbers are thousands or tens of thousands.
What do you define as "server" in this context? OS installations?
Yes, server meaning a VM in most cases.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
Going down to a single host will lower cost and, we assume, increase reliability too!
I've never really understood the desire for a single over double host. Whatever contract I've had with HP has never prevented them saying "Sorry, your critical part is stuck at the port in Holland and there is nothing we can do".
And I'm not sure the costs of two hosts are significantly higher - you're still looking at the same amount of processing power, memory and storage, which are the main costs. Plus licensing, but that is variable depending on what you're running.
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@carnival-boy said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
And I'm not sure the costs of two hosts are significantly higher - you're still looking at the same amount of processing power, memory and storage, which are the main costs. Plus licensing, but that is variable depending on what you're running.
It's twice the cost actually.
If you set up HA then you must have a total 100% more RAM and storage compared to one host.
It's because with two hosts, each host needs to have the capacity to run all workloads if the other host fails.
With three hosts you need the same amount of spare capacity but you can spread it out on three hosts. If one host fails you have two hosts that can share the workloads. The math is basically the same as RAID-5.
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I'm not talking about HA. Just plain old non-HA environments.
However, with the ability to run some, or all, environments on a single host if another host fails. But you don't need to double the resources, as it is generally acceptable to run a slower environment for a few days.
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@carnival-boy said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
I'm not talking about HA. Just plain old non-HA environments.
However, with the ability to run some, or all, environments on a single host if another host fails. But you don't need to double the resources, as it is generally acceptable to run a slower environment for a few days.
Maybe yes, maybe no - at minimum you'd need double the storage, otherwise you can't the the workload from the down server onto the remaining one.
Also - is your plan to replicate the two hosts to each other so the data is available on the second host in case of failure? or is the plan to restore from tape?
I guess I just don't see that as really viable unless you go the full'ish HA route.
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@carnival-boy said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
Going down to a single host will lower cost and, we assume, increase reliability too!
I've never really understood the desire for a single over double host. Whatever contract I've had with HP has never prevented them saying "Sorry, your critical part is stuck at the port in Holland and there is nothing we can do".
And I'm not sure the costs of two hosts are significantly higher - you're still looking at the same amount of processing power, memory and storage, which are the main costs. Plus licensing, but that is variable depending on what you're running.
If you live in an area where the vendor can't promise you the warranty and parts level you're purchasing (or simply can't purchase) then of course you have to decide other paths to take to get to your recovery objective.
Perhaps that would be extra storage/RAM, etc on the shelf.
While not impossible, I've only lost one server mobo in 20+ years, never lost a RAID controller or RAM. Scott has more experience here with 1000's of servers on wallstreet - but if memory servers (and JB will say it never does me) Scott experience there is still very low, likely to the point of not really worrying about it. But again, it depends on your situation.
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@carnival-boy said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
I'm not talking about HA. Just plain old non-HA environments.
However, with the ability to run some, or all, environments on a single host if another host fails. But you don't need to double the resources, as it is generally acceptable to run a slower environment for a few days.
That's manual HA with caveats.
Sure, it might be the best thing is some cases. Overconsolidating and putting all your eggs in one basket is not always the best.
But even if you get away with less than double the hardware you still need more than with just one host. So the hardware is going to be more expensive, the licensing of hosts and guest VMs is going to be more and energy is going to cost more.
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One thing I haven't seen asked/talked about in this entire thread is - does the client still actually need their own servers? Can they put this in VPS? Like Vultr, etc?
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@pete-s said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
@carnival-boy said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
I'm not talking about HA. Just plain old non-HA environments.
However, with the ability to run some, or all, environments on a single host if another host fails. But you don't need to double the resources, as it is generally acceptable to run a slower environment for a few days.
That's manual HA with caveats.
Sure, it might be the best thing is some cases. Overconsolidating and putting all your eggs in one basket is not always the best.
But even if you get away with less than double the hardware you still need more than with just one host. So the hardware is going to be more expensive, the licensing of hosts and guest VMs is going to be more and energy is going to cost more.
I recall previous discussions around the eggs one basket thing. It doesn't really apply to most Small Businesses - why? because all of these services are generally needed. If one is down, the business is down, or at least crippled so much that those remaining don't matter. So putting everything on a single server isn't this huge risk that some think it is, because if the main app is dead, who cares about the rest.
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@dashrender said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
@pete-s said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
@carnival-boy said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
I'm not talking about HA. Just plain old non-HA environments.
However, with the ability to run some, or all, environments on a single host if another host fails. But you don't need to double the resources, as it is generally acceptable to run a slower environment for a few days.
That's manual HA with caveats.
Sure, it might be the best thing is some cases. Overconsolidating and putting all your eggs in one basket is not always the best.
But even if you get away with less than double the hardware you still need more than with just one host. So the hardware is going to be more expensive, the licensing of hosts and guest VMs is going to be more and energy is going to cost more.
I recall previous discussions around the eggs one basket thing. It doesn't really apply to most Small Businesses - why? because all of these services are generally needed. If one is down, the business is down, or at least crippled so much that those remaining don't matter. So putting everything on a single server isn't this huge risk that some think it is, because if the main app is dead, who cares about the rest.
Maybe, maybe not. The idea would be that you can run the main app on the other host and stop some of those less critical apps if needed to make space for the important stuff.
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@pete-s said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
@dashrender said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
@pete-s said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
@carnival-boy said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
I'm not talking about HA. Just plain old non-HA environments.
However, with the ability to run some, or all, environments on a single host if another host fails. But you don't need to double the resources, as it is generally acceptable to run a slower environment for a few days.
That's manual HA with caveats.
Sure, it might be the best thing is some cases. Overconsolidating and putting all your eggs in one basket is not always the best.
But even if you get away with less than double the hardware you still need more than with just one host. So the hardware is going to be more expensive, the licensing of hosts and guest VMs is going to be more and energy is going to cost more.
I recall previous discussions around the eggs one basket thing. It doesn't really apply to most Small Businesses - why? because all of these services are generally needed. If one is down, the business is down, or at least crippled so much that those remaining don't matter. So putting everything on a single server isn't this huge risk that some think it is, because if the main app is dead, who cares about the rest.
Maybe, maybe not. The idea would be that you can run the main app on the other host and stop some of those less critical apps if needed to make space for the important stuff.
So you have two servers.
1- main app
2 - other less important stuff1 dies - now what? restore from backup on 2 and launch it? or have the main app always replicated to 1?
These are definitely options, but you need to look at the total costs of those to make sure it's business worthy.
If you're already going to the point of having two hosts - chances are that the extra RAM/storage isn't really that much to just make a sudo-HA setup (i.e. replicate VMs between hosts, manually power on in case of host failure)
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@carnival-boy said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:
I've never really understood the desire for a single over double host.
All about money. If the value of the uptime is less than the cost of the second host, you don't get a second host. That's lost money.
These days, most people (most just being over 51% mind you) can shift the most critical workloads to cloud or desktop or some other holdover temporarily while waiting for a part.
I would say that 90% of my customers don't need a second server, and wouldn't see a single dollar of benefit to it if they had one, because they have other ways to keep the workloads running while the server gets repaired or replaced. And I've almost never had an issue getting parts under SLA because if they don't meet the SLA we get money back and they don't want that to happen. I've done literally thousands of HPE parts replacements (and other vendors too) and I can't remember (although I am sure that they have) them missing their SLA. Generally they would have parts in minutes rather than the four hour SLA period (NYC and Dallas are amazing for parts availability, of course.)
