Where to find "best practice" for any given IT scenario
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My issue with best practice is that it often requires spending a lot of money. Some of my more creative solutions have been motivated by saving money. Sometimes cheap solutions are a false economy, when they become so flaky they end up costing more to maintain and fix than just doing the job properly to start with, but sometimes they are successful.
But I'm also not entirely clear on the difference between "best practice" and "industry norm". For example, the industry norm is to run Microsoft Office, but that doesn't make it best practice. Best practice may be to run LibreOffice, but not many companies do. If you started a thread on Spiceworks saying which Office suite should I use, I reckon almost everyone will say Microsoft Office. Does that make it best practice?
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@Carnival-Boy Using a specific application such as Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice for an example is a very poor example.
RAID 5 vs RAID 10 on spinning rust is a much better example.
RAID 5 was Industry Norm several years ago. Now RAID 10 is because it's much more resilient to URE's as well as other failures.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@Carnival-Boy Using a specific application such as Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice for an example is a very poor example.
Sorry, it was the best I could do
I'm basically a software guy with little interest or knowledge in hardware issues like RAID. -
@Carnival-Boy OK think of it like this, the software comparison is like comparing two cars, both do the exact same thing, get you from point A to Point B.
Both are reliable enough to work consistently.
So there's really no comparison, at this point its simply preference as to which you want and what you have to spend.
Comparing the example to something that is measurable, lets say the cars crash test rating would be a better example.
Car A gets 2 starts for front end crashes. Car B gets 5 Stars.
Which car do you want to drive?
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@DustinB3403 said:
@Carnival-Boy Using a specific application such as Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice for an example is a very poor example.
RAID 5 vs RAID 10 on spinning rust is a much better example.
RAID 5 was Industry Norm several years ago. Now RAID 10 is because it's much more resilient to URE's as well as other failures.
That's a bit different. RAID 10 isn't a "best practice", although avoiding RAID 5 is. The best practice is to know RAID and evaluate your needs on an individual bases.
What you are looking at here is a "rule of thumb" or a "de facto starting point." If you know NOTHING about storage and need storage for your server, start from OBR10 and diverge as needed. Best practice is not to know "nothing" about it and make informed decisions. OBR10 gives you a default, a place to assume "most common" but that's different than a best practice.
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Best Practice: A routinely repeatable process to achieve best results. Should be applicable at least 99% of the time and probably far more.
Rule of Thumb: A common and general safe assumption as a reasonable way to go when you don't have time or the ability to thoroughly assess all of the factors. Should be applicable more than 50% of the time. And should err "on the safe side."
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@DustinB3403 said:
RAID 5 was Industry Norm several years ago. Now RAID 10 is because it's much more resilient to URE's as well as other failures.
RAID 5 was a norm but never a best practice. Even in the 1990s it was presented as a reasonable risk to save money. Not the same as a best practice by any stretch.
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Best Practices will essentially never involve technical details. Best Practices are called "practices" because it is generally about human processes, not technical details. Tech details change and exist in massive variety for a reason. If there were truly best technical processes, I would run out and create "Best Practices IT Gear" and sell pre-built, best practice equipment for a premium and no one would ever need to buy elsewhere or even work in IT. But I can't do that. There are things in IT we can "always avoid", like RAID 5 on spinning disks or not taking backups of important data, but there are very few things we "always do".
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@DustinB3403 said:
@Carnival-Boy OK think of it like this, the software comparison is like comparing two cars, both do the exact same thing, get you from point A to Point B.
Both are reliable enough to work consistently.
I'm really not sure of your definition of best practice. I'm not sure what my definition is, but I'm sure it would be different to yours. Your example works for RAID too. RAID 5 and RAID 10 do the same thing and both are reliable enough to work consistently. RAID 5 works. I'd consider it not be generally best practice on the grounds that it is slightly less reliable than RAID 10. Much like cars, they all work, but some are more reliable than others.
Another example. I currently use Google Drive as a secondary backup of my corporate data. That is definitely not best practice (in my definition, anyways :)). It is not designed for that and it is not massively reliable. But it works. No IT firm would recommend that solution to their clients (I'd hope), but I'm still happy to use it. Partly because I understand the risks.
Another example. I believe it is best practice to only buy HP or Dell PCs in a corporate environment. But as with you car example, other manufacturers are perfectly reliable and most of the time you'd have no problems with them. But I think people should only buy HP/Dell.
Hmmmn, actually maybe that's more of a rule of thumb than best practice
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@Carnival-Boy said:
RAID 5 works. I'd consider it not be generally best practice on the grounds that it is slightly less reliable than RAID 10.
That's not at all why I consider it not a best practice. The reasons are complicated, far more than can be distilled to a quick statement. Also, RAID 5 does not work by most business definitions - it fails to provide the level of protection assumed or required. That's one piece.
It isn't that RAID 5 is slightly less than ten, it is that it is a full order of magnitude less than RAID 6 which, in turn, is less than RAID 10. But that isn't it either.
There are business scenarios where RAID 5, risky as it is, is certainly "safe enough". The issue becomes that when RAID 5 is "safe enough" there are other factors. It becomes too costly to make it safe enough, it fails to scale and remain safe, it isn't fast enough, etc. The combination of business factors around safety, speed, capacity and cost, no matter which one you optimize for, RAID 5 doesn't come out to be the right one, ever. It can be functional, but it can't ever be the right choice.
This, in turn, means that knowing this having RAID 5 in our decision matrix just increases the chances that we, as emotional humans, will get confused by the extra choice and make bad decisions. We do our best decision making when known bad choices are removed from consideration. If a computer was factoring all of the issues and making a determination having RAID 5 in the mix would not matter. But for humans, it really matters.
So not only is it never the right choice, but it could actively influence us to make bad choices too.
Best practice is to simply remove it from consideration to clarify the remaining choices.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Best practice is to simply remove it from consideration to clarify the remaining choices.
This reminds me of Darren's talk at SpiceWorld - only give the CEO/CFO the choices that you approve. Never provide them one that you don't want, they'll always pick that one.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Best practice is to simply remove it from consideration to clarify the remaining choices.
This reminds me of Darren's talk at SpiceWorld - only give the CEO/CFO the choices that you approve. Never provide them one that you don't want, they'll always pick that one.
By providing it, you are presenting it as an option. Basically meaning you approved it. You can tell them your top choices, but if you include it in the list, it's approved to some degree or the conversation is confused.
What surprises me is how often IT people will present completely unreasonable options as options to management. If your car got a flat, would you offer to 1) fix the flat or 2) set the car on fire? No, you would not offer something ridiculous that isn't reasonable. But IT often does this to management.
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Discussing the ones you don't want simple means others will get confused. It's a great way to avoid unnecessary conversations.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
RAID 5 works. I'd consider it not be generally best practice on the grounds that it is slightly less reliable than RAID 10.
That's not at all why I consider it not a best practice. The reasons are complicated, far more than can be distilled to a quick statement. Also, RAID 5 does not work by most business definitions - it fails to provide the level of protection assumed or required. That's one piece.
It isn't that RAID 5 is slightly less than ten, it is that it is a full order of magnitude less than RAID 6 which, in turn, is less than RAID 10. But that isn't it either.
There are business scenarios where RAID 5, risky as it is, is certainly "safe enough". The issue becomes that when RAID 5 is "safe enough" there are other factors. It becomes too costly to make it safe enough, it fails to scale and remain safe, it isn't fast enough, etc. The combination of business factors around safety, speed, capacity and cost, no matter which one you optimize for, RAID 5 doesn't come out to be the right one, ever. It can be functional, but it can't ever be the right choice.
This, in turn, means that knowing this having RAID 5 in our decision matrix just increases the chances that we, as emotional humans, will get confused by the extra choice and make bad decisions. We do our best decision making when known bad choices are removed from consideration. If a computer was factoring all of the issues and making a determination having RAID 5 in the mix would not matter. But for humans, it really matters.
Isn't that pretty much what I said - it's slightly less reliable than RAID 10?
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@Carnival-Boy It's not just a little bit, its 10's if not 100's of scales less reliable in a recovery situation.
The likelihood of recovering from a RAID 5 failure vs a RAID 10 failure is apples vs whales.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Isn't that pretty much what I said - it's slightly less reliable than RAID 10?
I would not use slightly when "order of magnitude" is involved
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OK, take two typical SMB servers, each with 12 x 300GB disks. One is configured with RAID 10 and one is configured with RAID 5.
One of the disks in each machine fails and is replaced. What is the probability in each case that the array will not rebuild successfully? Roughly speaking.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
OK, take two typical SMB servers, each with 12 x 300GB disks. One is configured with RAID 10 and one is configured with RAID 5.
One of the disks in each machine fails and is replaced. What is the probability in each case that the array will not rebuild successfully? Roughly speaking.
I can see Scott in the corner right now doing the math (or just posting a link to where he's already done the math). From what I recall, 3.3 TB has like a 30% chance of hitting a URE, AKA total failure of the array. At something around 12TB there is statistically a 100% chance of hitting a URE (OK it might actually be 99.99%)
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Best practice is to simply remove it from consideration to clarify the remaining choices.
This reminds me of Darren's talk at SpiceWorld - only give the CEO/CFO the choices that you approve. Never provide them one that you don't want, they'll always pick that one.
By providing it, you are presenting it as an option. Basically meaning you approved it. You can tell them your top choices, but if you include it in the list, it's approved to some degree or the conversation is confused.
What surprises me is how often IT people will present completely unreasonable options as options to management. If your car got a flat, would you offer to 1) fix the flat or 2) set the car on fire? No, you would not offer something ridiculous that isn't reasonable. But IT often does this to management.
The more likely scenario is that management will reject all provided solutions and ask why it can't be done cheaper. Of course it can be done cheaper, but with orders of magnitude more risk. What is the recommendation then?
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Using RAID 6 or RAID 10 which are both safer than RAID 5.
