Non-profit infrastructure upgrades
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@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Breffni-Potter said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
A sign of things to come from the relationship.
I would look into getting a new MSP.
Or getting an MSP at all. Leave the VARs behind. You didn't get IT there, you got sales.
Exactly - What they need to look for is someone who will make recommendations but not sell them those recommendations.
And this brings up a question of management - what manager allowed the bad IT to happen in the past then jumped right back to what we assume are the same mistakes without learning from his past mistakes? This sounds like a core management, rather than an IT, problem. Basic misunderstanding of how to acquire recommendations.
Well to me this brings up - how is management suppose to know a good from a bad MSP/ITSP, etc.
Good or bad is hard. VAR vs consultant is easy. This isn't about being bad at finding someone. This is about not knowing business basics or common sense. Totally different. Get past the black and white stuff, then we can tackle the Grey stuff.
I feel that this just isn't something known as business basics or common sense or street smarts - whatever you want to call it, I think this is something that needs to be learned, and it's not even being taught in most cases. Is it there to learn, sure, but frankly I think it's more the luck of the draw that you learn it than it's the standard that everyone learns. Critical thinking isn't something taught in primary school.
Well it is. Knowing who is selling something and who you paid for advice is a basic adult skill. Really basic.
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@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Breffni-Potter said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
A sign of things to come from the relationship.
I would look into getting a new MSP.
Or getting an MSP at all. Leave the VARs behind. You didn't get IT there, you got sales.
Exactly - What they need to look for is someone who will make recommendations but not sell them those recommendations.
And this brings up a question of management - what manager allowed the bad IT to happen in the past then jumped right back to what we assume are the same mistakes without learning from his past mistakes? This sounds like a core management, rather than an IT, problem. Basic misunderstanding of how to acquire recommendations.
Well to me this brings up - how is management suppose to know a good from a bad MSP/ITSP, etc.
Good or bad is hard. VAR vs consultant is easy. This isn't about being bad at finding someone. This is about not knowing business basics or common sense. Totally different. Get past the black and white stuff, then we can tackle the Grey stuff.
I feel that this just isn't something known as business basics or common sense or street smarts - whatever you want to call it, I think this is something that needs to be learned, and it's not even being taught in most cases. Is it there to learn, sure, but frankly I think it's more the luck of the draw that you learn it than it's the standard that everyone learns. Critical thinking isn't something taught in primary school.
No need to teach it. This is WAY more fundamental than that. This is ridiculously basic. Saying someone needs to be taught that is inappropriately insulting and condescending. You are saying that they literally can't identify "buying something".
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It boils down to critical thinking.
Sure, you know when you are paying someone for advice vs just buying something - but the countless times any of us are wandering through an electronics store and hear some person ask the sales person for advice tells me that buyer is clearly not critically thinking about who they are asking this question to, and therefore are ending up in the situation they are in.
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@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
It boils down to critical thinking.
Sure. Extremely basic critical thinking. And critical thinking is the sole thing you pay for in a manager.
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@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
It boils down to critical thinking.
Sure. Extremely basic critical thinking. And critical thinking is the sole thing you pay for in a manager.
Reality says otherwise. You're correct, but that's not what goes on in the real world unfortunately.
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@JaredBusch said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
It boils down to critical thinking.
Sure. Extremely basic critical thinking. And critical thinking is the sole thing you pay for in a manager.
Reality says otherwise. You're correct, but that's not what goes on in the real world unfortunately.
Right. But it should. Every CEO can be held accountable immediately and hold their team accountable. There are critical thinkers available for those jobs. The owners or boards or investors just have to decide to actually care.
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Alienvault makes really nice SMB security appliances. They literally do all security functions on one device for the cost of a single purpose appliance. The only downfall with Alienvault, it does have a bit of a learning curve but once you learn it you are good to go.
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@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@JaredBusch said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
It boils down to critical thinking.
Sure. Extremely basic critical thinking. And critical thinking is the sole thing you pay for in a manager.
Reality says otherwise. You're correct, but that's not what goes on in the real world unfortunately.
Right. But it should. Every CEO can be held accountable immediately and hold their team accountable. There are critical thinkers available for those jobs. The owners or boards or investors just have to decide to actually care.
Scott - that's just it - we don't live in should - we live in what is happening around us. Toning your conversations to provide the understanding that you know and understand this will go a HUGE way toward getting an easier conversation with people.
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@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@JaredBusch said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Dashrender said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
It boils down to critical thinking.
Sure. Extremely basic critical thinking. And critical thinking is the sole thing you pay for in a manager.
Reality says otherwise. You're correct, but that's not what goes on in the real world unfortunately.
Right. But it should. Every CEO can be held accountable immediately and hold their team accountable. There are critical thinkers available for those jobs. The owners or boards or investors just have to decide to actually care.
Scott - that's just it - we don't live in should - we live in what is happening around us. Toning your conversations to provide the understanding that you know and understand this will go a HUGE way toward getting an easier conversation with people.
But WE live in the should. OUR job is to understand what should be and work towards it within our scope. That's our job as IT pros, and our job as peers in the community.
Understanding when you are in a store or paying for advice is basic adulting, it just is. Do many SMBs have managers that literally fall below the "what you should know at 18 years old as a competent adult" line? Of course, but they shouldn't and we need to understand this as IT pros, and we need to understand it as employees and we need to understand how it impacts our careers and how we work with companies.
For example, as the board member here, the OP has a responsibility to find out WHY this happened, not just gloss over it. We are literally talking to the person who is responsible for the "does" in this company. So talking about what "should" happen is literally the only thing we should be discussing. You would never, ever tell an "owner" to do something reckless just because lots of other companies do, right? Well the OP is as close to owner as a non-profit has.
So if you recommend anything here that isn't what "should" be, you are introducing bad advice, which we should never give.
Now if we were talking to an IT guy in the middle of the command chain, we should still make it clear what "should" be, but also consider how to deal with the real world situation that he is in. But that is not the case here. We are literally talking to the person that needs to understand the "shoulds" and needs to make sure that they happen.
So this is absolutely real world and applicable in every way. This is the very situation where every question about "how did the CEO get into this situation" is 100% applicable without just the need for understanding what good looks like, but with the entire scope of available action.
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said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
New server
Poweredge R530
Dual E5-2609 v4
32GB Ram
PERC H730 1GB NV
(4) 1TB SATA HDs in Raid 6
Dual SD modules (Hyper-V)
5 year NBD pro-supportThis bit....
I feel like an R410 or R610 would likely be plenty for such a small machine. NL-SAS in RAID 10 would boost the IOPS and safety by a lot while dropping the whole server to likely in the $900 range. 32GB is tiny today and that size of storage does not need the R5xx 2U chassis and CPU is always far less than you think that you need.
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Managed switches? Are you not on a flat network? What network management is needed?
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@Reid-Cooper said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
Managed switches? Are you not on a flat network? What network management is needed?
What's wrong with using Managed Switches on a 'flat network'? In the Non Profit I picked my (Cisco) Managed Switches ten years ago it was a case of being able to manage the ports and either drop their speed or turn them off all together while not having to fool with the cables.
When you work with those in transition during addiction treatment, you don't leave every port open. And as a one person department, I didn't want to have to deal with all the patch cables and what not every time something needed to be moved or a new employee started.
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@gjacobse said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
@Reid-Cooper said in Non-profit infrastructure upgrades:
Managed switches? Are you not on a flat network? What network management is needed?
What's wrong with using Managed Switches on a 'flat network'? In the Non Profit I picked my (Cisco) Managed Switches ten years ago it was a case of being able to manage the ports and either drop their speed or turn them off all together while not having to fool with the cables.
When you work with those in transition during addiction treatment, you don't leave every port open. And as a one person department, I didn't want to have to deal with all the patch cables and what not every time something needed to be moved or a new employee started.
I think you are confused as to what a managed switch is. Nothing that you mention comes from a switch being managed. Managed means "Managed by SNMP" and is exclusively for very large companies with network engineering teams. Unless you were using SNMP centrally to manage your switches, your VAR sold you a line to jack up the prices at the non-profit. VARs famously lie about that, like SANs, it's one of the "quick bucks" that they can make for zero effort.
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Smart switches are cheaper than managed switches, normally by quite a bit. And they are way easier for a small business to manage as they normally just use a web browser or a simple utility instead of making you use expensive and complex central management tools for SNMP.
