Understanding Server 2012r2 Clustering
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@Dashrender said:
When he told me that I freaked out on him... told him why this was a horrible solution - he didn't seem to care. "It's to late" he said, "It's already done and installed and working."
This is one of those excuses that really bad IT pros seem to use a lot. "It is working." They redefine what "working" means as it suites them. It's like driving around without a seatbelt on. Sure, as long as you are driving, it is "working." But the seatbelt is there for when you hit a tree. When you go through the windshield and lie bleeding out on the ground, will you still say "it is working?"
The point of good design, in this particular base, is to get better reliability and speed at a lower price. If the IT pro defines what he has done as "working" it means that being cost effective and protecting the business financially aren't part of his job. What exactly IS his job then? It sounds like he feels his job is to funnel company money to a vendor and not to provide good IT advice or service. In fact, by using the vendor to do his job for him, he likely didn't do his job as the IT pro at all!
That things are "too late" is one thing. But claiming that it doesn't matter, fixing a discovered problem isn't important or that it is working highlights what he feels his job is or how little he cares about the company he is working for. He's not trying to do the right thing, he is hoping not to get found out that he scammed the business and tried to get away without providing any technical expertise and letting a sales person hoodwink him while he thought he was getting away without having to know his job.
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It's amazing, given how obviously illogical, how many discussions and how much documentation there is out there about the foolishness of the single SAN Inverted Pyramid of Doom design that any VAR would take the risk of recommending it knowing that tons of IT pros will know instantly that they are being scammed and that they should drop the vendor like a hot rock. But, the reality is, if a VAR is being asked for advice, they know that the customer is trying to get away without doing the research and isn't sure what to do and simply by being asked for the advice know that they can get away with some pretty crazy stuff. So the group of people that will call out the vendors for doing this stuff are the ones who naturally don't engage the vendors in this way making it very safe for the vendors to try so pretty crazy sales tactics and approaches.
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The flip side to this is that asking the VAR is considered the research to most of them. And really, until I joined SW several years ago I was doing exactly the same thing.
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@Dashrender said:
The flip side to this is that asking the VAR is considered the research to most of them.
In the SMB there seems to be this really broad acceptance of using sales people as IT advisers. It is very widespread. I never saw it happen until being in SW. Literally never. I had no idea that it was done at all so came as a pretty big shock.
It's not IT specific in any way, using sales people for advice is just problematic.
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Check out SAN topics all the advice to get them are from Sellers, and the HP one especially is full of BS. Yet they still go with the sales peoples advice. The HP one says the SANs of two aren't the same as your dad's SAN, they are much more reliable or something like that.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Check out SAN topics all the advice to get them are from Sellers, and the HP one especially is full of BS. Yet they still go with the sales peoples advice. The HP one says the SANs of two aren't the same as your dad's SAN, they are much more reliable or something like that.
I blame management. Instead of looking for their IT staff to provide IT services, they make them just people who buy things from others who provide IT. It's the IT oursource model. Except they refuse to pay for professional IT services. So instead they go to vendors and get advice from the sales people for free and say "this is just the cost of what we need." It's an illusion that is created by bad management. They don't get the skills that they need internally and refuse to let people buy advice, which is really 95% of what IT actually is. Anyone can do the physical parts of IT.
So once management does this, they create a situation where the internal staff isn't sure what to do and isn't able to hire the IT people that they need (externally) and are stuck getting free advice which actually costs them a fortune in risk, bad advice and over purchasing.
The internal staff has no reason to give advice, even if they know better, because it just adds risks to themselves. Why take on risk to save a company money that obviously doesn't respect IT and doesn't care about making money? Why should IT take on that risk? So they don't. They let a vendor oversell and then have the benefit of having someone to "blame" when the company loses money or goes under. How can it be IT's fault when their only job is to sign off on whatever a sales person sold to them?
It's management making IT a "purchaser" rather than a "professional" that creates this situation. If management expected IT to research, give advice and protect the business this really could not happen. But when IT's job is just to talk to the sales people on behalf of management, what else could realistically happen? Once again, management makes their internal staff not be aligned with the company's goals. Why would IT work against its own interests when management are the ones who created the conflict of interests?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
The flip side to this is that asking the VAR is considered the research to most of them.
In the SMB there seems to be this really broad acceptance of using sales people as IT advisers. It is very widespread. I never saw it happen until being in SW. Literally never. I had no idea that it was done at all so came as a pretty big shock.
It's not IT specific in any way, using sales people for advice is just problematic.
So where do the IBM's and Mutual of Omaha's (non technical company) get their advice from?
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@Dashrender said:
So where do the IBM's and Mutual of Omaha's (non technical company) get their advice from?
Not sure what you are asking here. Are you asking where does IBM go to get IT advice when they need to make decisions?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So where do the IBM's and Mutual of Omaha's (non technical company) get their advice from?
Not sure what you are asking here. Are you asking where does IBM go to get IT advice when they need to make decisions?
Yes.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So where do the IBM's and Mutual of Omaha's (non technical company) get their advice from?
Not sure what you are asking here. Are you asking where does IBM go to get IT advice when they need to make decisions?
Yes.
They have the money for lots of in house testing. SMBs don't.
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Companies like IBM, Mutual of Omaha or others have several ways that they get expertise, all very obvious, I hope...
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They have internal IT that is held accountable for doing IT, not for buying "solutions". IT is accountable for doing IT well. This is critical. If IT has no responsibility for doing IT, why would it? It's cheaper and easier not to. So the bulk of their expertise is internal.
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They bring in consultants that work internally to augment internal IT. IBM specifically uses shadow IT so that they can have a main IT entity that is unskilled and political but does nothing. And shadow IT does runs the actual company and makes the real stuff happen.
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When the above two need additional advice, which is really, really rare, they bring in external consulting firms and pay for consulting. They do not use sales people for advice.
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Sales people are kept at arm's length and used to pressure vendors for deals and to get access to the latest vendor news. The sales people do not construct solutions.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
They have the money for lots of in house testing. SMBs don't.
In house testing is one thing. But SMBs have access to all the industry knowledge, training, expertise, etc. They just often choose not to spend money there because being "IT expertise" is seen as a loss but buying "stuff" is not. So they spend a fortune on "things" they don't need because they didn't hire the people to tell them what to do.
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It doesn't require lots of money or testing or anything like that to know what a SAN is, where the risks are going to come from, how to engage outside vendors, etc. Those things are just common sense, industry knowledge, standard training or things you can research easily. Some things require testing, like Windows patching, that those require that the IBMs work differently than the SMBs. But lots of things do not require that.
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So it boils down to training and research - I suppose finding the needed research is not as simple as Scott might suggest, i.e. even google searching doesn't always lead you where you want, or more importantly, need to be to get correct information.
The other type of research would be buying the equipment yourself and simply using it. This is something that clearly Scott's pocketbook can afford as it seems he's buying new VM's from cloud service providers almost weekly (at least recently).
Granted most IT people (probably even me) aren't really good at their jobs - we don't look at a SAN for example and instantly know that it's a horrible mess because, well it's 'obvious.' Instead it's only after being exposed to them, or reading or knowing other who are exposed to them that we realize the pitfalls of things like SANs.
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@Dashrender said:
we don't look at a SAN for example and instantly know that it's a horrible mess because, well it's 'obvious.'
A SAN in itself isn't always a horrible mess (some are) it's the implementation of the SAN that's a mess and using them when they are not needed.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Dashrender said:
we don't look at a SAN for example and instantly know that it's a horrible mess because, well it's 'obvious.'
A SAN in itself isn't always a horrible mess (some are) it's the implementation of the SAN that's a mess and using them when they are not needed.
Really - that's all you took from my comment? Of course SAN isn't always a horrible mess, I was just making a point without being exact.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Remember the long conversation that we had about how you trust your sales people and don't feel that the financial compensation for selling certain solutions was influencing them and that they acted altruistically? This is the text book example that we use for what a vendor taking advantage of you looking for free advice looks for.
Er, no, I don't, because I never said that. I know that in your binary world I must either trust vendors 100% or I think they're all lying bastards out to rip me off, but in my grey world the reality sits somewhere in the middle. I get advice from vendors, but I also do my own research. I find the way you constantly lump all sales people into the same grubby boat to be pretty disrespectful of the thousands of them they are motivated by doing right by their customers.
Anyway, I only posted originally to find out how exactly why Exchange should never be installed on a SAN. VMware advertise using HA with Exchange and Microsoft officially support it. This is the first time I've heard it's a complete no-no. Are you saying VMware are lying and trying to rip me off as well? http://www.vmware.com/business-critical-apps/exchange/
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I find the way you constantly lump all sales people into the same grubby boat to be pretty disrespectful of the thousands of them they are motivated by doing right by their customers.
And I find that there is no disrespect until you change what I said from saying how they are paid into them being in a grubby boat. I, in no way whatsoever, suggest that the sales people are being bad at all. That's something you read into it. It's how they are engaged and expected to act against their own interest and the financial direction given by their customers that I think is bad, not the sales people.
Why do you feel that that would reflect badly on salespeople at all?
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@Dashrender said:
The other type of research would be buying the equipment yourself and simply using it. This is something that clearly Scott's pocketbook can afford as it seems he's buying new VM's from cloud service providers almost weekly (at least recently).
But, as I have pointed out many times, this is not a means to do IT research. In IT two of our biggest concerns are risk and cost. Buying and testing does not tell you much, or possibly anything, about either. This is one of the huge places in IT where observational thinkers will always fail. IT, at the architectural level, is always, due to the inability for the industry to produce large scale studies, a domain of induction, not observation.
It never requires owning a SAN to know that a SAN is a very bad fit for most use cases. All it takes is knowing what a SAN is. The rest is very clear. Knowing how to configure a SAN and some nuances of use might require owning own or two but knowing what a SAN is (a server that provides block storage) alone tells you nearly everything that you need to know for the majority of decision making cases.
And what IT pro hasn't had free access to a SAN? You can build one in a VM to know what it is and how it works. You can get a USB drive and that's a SAN if you set it up correctly (just realizing this answers so many questions.) My first "real" SAN, one packaged and sold as a SAN with no means of attaching directly, was only $99. So these things, from an educational perspective, are not at all out of reach even when you need to physically have stuff for observation.
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@Dashrender said:
So it boils down to training and research - I suppose finding the needed research is not as simple as Scott might suggest, i.e. even google searching doesn't always lead you where you want, or more importantly, need to be to get correct information.
Like any field, IT is not something you can "Google search." That's fine when the goal is to figure out what button to press or knob to tweak. But knowing what a SAN is, for example, requires having sat down and knowing about the field. Same for civil engineering. I'm sure that civil engineers can Google lots of specific equations or look up common ways to make a bridge arch or whatever, but to know when to use that stuff or how to use it properly or to know what the general range of options are (instead of just knowing the name of one arch type) they need to have taken time to study the corpus of industry knowledge and have the necessary foundation to know what "civil engineers know."
No civil engineer has all knowledge of all things. Of course not, but there is a foundation of knowledge that is relatively standard and applies to most use cases that gives "every" civil engineer a base from which to do further research, look up specifics, etc. Lacking foundational knowledge leaves anyone from civil engineer to IT pro, lost and in little to no better position to design solutions than any random person looking at the problem.
IT is additionally hurt by the fact that we just "buy" so much of what we do. Civil engineers can't just go buy an arch somewhere (okay, maybe once in a while but generally they build these) so there aren't arch vendors pounding on their doors trying to sell the latest and greatest arch to them. But in IT, there is someone trying to sell a "solution" that requires you to not do the IT work at every step. Don't what to research the right storage design for your product? Here is one that isn't good for you but your boss won't likely realize that until you've moved onto another job, just buy this and we'll do the work for you and you can just sit back and skip the hard work and as long as your boss doesn't know IT either, no one will ever be in a position to realize that you just skipped the IT steps.
It's very tempting and once you see lots of companies doing this, how can you resist?
