The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge
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@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
I think we've reached stasis here. I've provided examples where the platform matters.
Okay, I'll buy that. The platform matters when internal IT has failed and you outsourced to an external IT department who has an interest in selling you something that you don't need to make extra money on probably the sale and definitely the consulting. Yes, I agree, but I don't agree that that doesn't match my original point. It's not in the interst of the customer, but there is a reason why they feel that they have to do it based on other decisions made in the same way.
Do you feel, however, that since this discussion is based on scale for the context of the original question, that there is ever a realistic time that this happens at three or fewer compute nodes? We are talking about three nodes for an entire business here. What business, anywhere, is that small and deploying systems where vendors interact with them in this manner? I'm not saying that theoretically it isn't possible, but this thread is asking for an example where this has ever happened.
Outside of pure theory, and even there I feel that it is hard to theorize, who has products that need these kinds of things while being so small as to not have benefits of the IPOD due to scale?
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@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
I learned years ago to never prescribe malice to what you can attribute to ignorance in this industry. He likely was unhappy the number in his dashboard didn't say 100K!
And likewise, my rule of thumb is that willful ignorance is one of the worst forms of malice
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@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
One last thought...
IF the reason that Xen has 2% market share is because there is NO LOGICAL REASON for vSphere or paid Hyper-V (with VMM to manage) then that means 98% of IT people are idiots. If 98% are idiots, wouldn't that mean they should be outsourcing their IT as much as possible to their vendors or others? (and therefore not deploy Xen).
Catch-22
Agreed. That makes total sense. And I agree 100%. Almost all (and I totally mean that, something like 98%) of IT should be outsourced. The industry should shrink dramatically, the smaller pool of people who remain should be consolidated into fewer shops and those shops should demand far higher levels of excellence and continued training and raise salaries significantly as the industry tends to lose people who are really valuable because they can often make more money elsewhere and choose to.
However, this is what I'm talking about that assuming bad decisions will be made we then make bad recommendations based on that. It's not valuable to make recommendations and there is no point in doing so, to the 98%. They neither look for nor listen to good advice. Good advice always exists solely for those that will take it. It's the same discussion as "is college valuable for you (in IT.)" If every single person ever listened to that advice, it would be self defeating in weird ways. But they don't, advice around it is for the .1% who might listend and enact change. Good advice remains good advice, that there are reasons why bad decisions are made doesn't make them bad decisions.
I'm never sure if I can explain what I mean here well, but I see it a lot in IT - people give bad advice (could be in any arena, I see it constantly, though) based on the idea that "well they won't listen to my actual good advice." Sure, we know that they won't, but should we make bad recommendations because of that?
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@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
The "IT guy is always" right attitude in IT bothers me.
Me too, that's why I rarely feel that IT should be allowed to decide things. But IT is the sole critical information holder for a lot of things in the business, performance, cost and security being key ones. No other department has a view into these factors. It is the job of business management to ensure that they have skilled IT that knows its role in the business, to pass decisions through them and to listen to them. And it is IT's job to understand that it is part of the context of the business and only knows certain factors.
That's why an IT veto is important because IT can identify scams, incompetence, lack of industry standards, bad practices and such that other departments would likely not even understand (what do you MEAN VB6 isn't a common thing any longer!!) - because they can filter out options that have no place being considered. Whereas the business needs to make most decisions because they know what is valuable to the business. Neither can act alone. The idea with much of this, though, is that IT would be bypassed and much of the most important IT decisions be made by people who are not IT.
Imagine doing this to HR or accounting. Would other departments demand that HR violate good practices around compensation or reporting? Or that accounting not correctly record expenditures or not pay all taxes? (These do happen, and it's normally very bad.)
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This is my quote from the original challenge: "We all (I hope by now) know that SANs have their place and a super obvious one that explains why enterprises use them almost universally and know why that usage has no applicability to normal SMBs - scale."
I agree with why lots of shops might deploy systems like you are describing, even if I generally don't agree with that decision, but I'm pretty confident that the use cases that you are describing @John-Nicholson are tied, nearly universally, to a scale that would already prompt a SAN-based infrastructure (or similar.)
Have you seen these in small environments where the scale did not exist to warrant a SAN otherwise?
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@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
Security - Guest introspection support to hit compliance needs, Micro-segmentation requirements (EPIC has drop in templates for NSX, Possibly HCI at some point). If you want actual micro-semtnagation and inspection on containers there isn't anything on the market that competes with Photon yet. At some point there may be ACI templates but that will require network hardware lock in (Nexus 9K) and that's even crazier (Applications defining what switch you can buy!).
Really, once you even start to think of defining the storage, you have to define the switches too. Once you are into that realm of not allowing IT to screw anything up, you can't let them screw anything up. You'd really want to be defining cabling, UPS and more as well.
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I'm definitely not trying to say that there are absolutely zero potential use cases for an IPOD, but only that they are so rare below the "scale" line (the drop dead number is three and the general rule of thumb is twelve) that I'm wondering if anyone has a real world example.
Even within the described examples, they are theoretical I believe, and very unlikely. How many of these have been observed?
It's worth pointing out the use case and adding it as an aside to a recommendation document. I'll give a completely different example, that hopefully explains my thinking...
If someone is deciding on if they want to attend university or not, we generally focus on things like the time and money, career advantages and such. But there are career choices, like doctor, lawyer or teacher, that require a degree and it is not in any way a decision, it simply is a requirement. That doesn't imply that the degree is useful for that field outside of the requirement, but the requirement is the requirement. So if an IPOD is a non-IT requirement without business context, it does not fall into the business context. While this should be assumed as being an exception to any case of business logic, it should probably be explicitly stated nonetheless because people often forget about the cases outside of the decision matrix - or focus solely on them and think that cases outside of the logic pool influence those within it (e.g. the career success of doctors tells us nothing about the value of a college degree outside of that one case where it is a requirement.)
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@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
This is my quote from the original challenge: "We all (I hope by now) know that SANs have their place and a super obvious one that explains why enterprises use them almost universally and know why that usage has no applicability to normal SMBs - scale."
I agree with why lots of shops might deploy systems like you are describing, even if I generally don't agree with that decision, but I'm pretty confident that the use cases that you are describing @John-Nicholson are tied, nearly universally, to a scale that would already prompt a SAN-based infrastructure (or similar.)
Have you seen these in small environments where the scale did not exist to warrant a SAN otherwise?
Have you see a flexpod or vBlock? Part of CI is defining the network switches and configuration of the fabric. The argument is even with a 20% capital markup the time to outcome out weighs the do it yourself approach, and historically they are right. The difference is going from CI to HCI has moved the time to value down exponentially. I think the logical progression for HCI vendors in some area's is to do just this.
Scale (long before you worked with them) in the old GPFS days had a stricter HCL for switches than any other iSCIS storage vendor I had ever seen. You know what, there was a reason. Scale out systems are incredibly vulnerable to shifty low end switching. I even tried deploying one with 3750X's (much more expensive than the 2910AL's, but practically much slower) and performance was awful until switches were replaced. The funny thing was the customer tried to blame scale (and not the slow Cisco switches that the network team was in love with). I would argue Scale is "ahead of the curve" in having HCL's and restrictions on outside factors that can make them look bad (this was something like 5 years ago).
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@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
This is my quote from the original challenge: "We all (I hope by now) know that SANs have their place and a super obvious one that explains why enterprises use them almost universally and know why that usage has no applicability to normal SMBs - scale."
I agree with why lots of shops might deploy systems like you are describing, even if I generally don't agree with that decision, but I'm pretty confident that the use cases that you are describing @John-Nicholson are tied, nearly universally, to a scale that would already prompt a SAN-based infrastructure (or similar.)
Have you seen these in small environments where the scale did not exist to warrant a SAN otherwise?
The deployment of shared storage (in whatever form it takes) I view about a demand for operational flexibility more than just a flat driver for availability of apps that can't HA themselves. The assumption that a SAN is driven entirely by scale alone, or HA alone is a false assumption.
Until HCI became more mainstream a DAS synchronous array (like his HUS) was really as bullet proof as you could get and still enjoy the operational benefit. Still for some customers (My old industry of TAS) that "pet rock" type deployment still has value over HCI.
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2 nodes is still limited for HCI. For mission critical environments with low skills in house (which is the TAS industry) true 2 node shared nothing systems still pose some risk (Quorum is not a concept they easily grasp, and in house staff are fully capable of screwing it up and split braining things). Shared DAS is far harder to @#$@ up. HCI can scale down, but as you have to have witness systems (And DRDB's common use with heartbeat of an IP I find to be a bullshit excuse of a witness system as it lacks state) there is extra complexity that can be beyond many steady state ops teams.
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White glove service (including onsite no matter where the hell the deployment is) has power. There's a lot you can do remote, but when the storage layer goes down, having a technician onsite who's badged and knows WTF they are doing is a powerful force. The farther up the stack you go this becomes less critical but for low level services that are stateful (and network used to access remotely) there is still value in good on site techs.
Now I recognize that most of this can be mitigated by outsourcing infrastructure operations. But at that point why would I buy a scale cluster (Vs. just put my stuff in one of the major public clouds, or THOUSANDS of VCAN partners who can hit my niche of compliance, operations capabilities, PaaS, and geographic connectivity requirements?). I"m seeing hundreds of public cloud providers adopt HCI, and realistically if the benefits (from cost, scaling etc) can be done in a hosted enviroment where there is better operations, engineering I would argue the real counter argument for small shops is not
HCI (with something like Scale) vs SAN, but rather HCI vs. Hosted Now maybe that is Scales end game (Have some key MSP partners they drive customers towards using) but building multi-tenant tools are hard, and that's a heavy arms race that will require quite a bit of capital to get right and would stray so far from their target market I don't see it.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
I think we've reached stasis here. I've provided examples where the platform matters.
Okay, I'll buy that. The platform matters when internal IT has failed and you outsourced to an external IT department who has an interest in selling you something that you don't need to make extra money on probably the sale and definitely the consulting. Yes, I agree, but I don't agree that that doesn't match my original point. It's not in the interst of the customer, but there is a reason why they feel that they have to do it based on other decisions made in the same way.
Do you feel, however, that since this discussion is based on scale for the context of the original question, that there is ever a realistic time that this happens at three or fewer compute nodes? We are talking about three nodes for an entire business here. What business, anywhere, is that small and deploying systems where vendors interact with them in this manner? I'm not saying that theoretically it isn't possible, but this thread is asking for an example where this has ever happened.
Outside of pure theory, and even there I feel that it is hard to theorize, who has products that need these kinds of things while being so small as to not have benefits of the IPOD due to scale?
Sure. If the customer has oracle or SQL 2016 or Windows Datacenter or other licensing per socket, simply shaving down from 3 nodes to 2 could be significant.
I've also seen companies where they had a site with very low compute requirements (Port facility) where they needed to scale deep (400TB for Video archive). Replicated local or RAIN is crazy more expensive on this (they spend 87K on a HUS with a RAID 60 style DP pool for this if memory serves, good luck buying 800 or 1600TB of disks for that price...
I know you like trying to find absolute rules for the SMB (which to be honest they kind of need, because if there's anything I learned from consulting in that space, or watching random SpiceWorks comments it is that everyone is at a subconscious level drawn towards awful idea's) but we are running increasingly into a world of workloads and needs that completely have no relation to what that company or site's industry or employee count is. Simple exclusionary rules make even less sense.
Its like decisions on RAID for storage systems. Increasingly the historic rules (Deploy RAID 10, and size for capacity) is becoming awful advice, and with most storage systems that are modern its not even something you can choose anymore as the decision is abstracted at a RAIN level (or in the case of most modern storage appliances it a fixed erasure code set based on a stripe width of their NVRAM's ability to destage a write). The real savior of the SMB here is platforms, appliances and systems that remove the ability to go off and do something stupid, rather than "hard and fast rules" that increasingly don't matter (or are wrong).
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@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
This is my quote from the original challenge: "We all (I hope by now) know that SANs have their place and a super obvious one that explains why enterprises use them almost universally and know why that usage has no applicability to normal SMBs - scale."
I agree with why lots of shops might deploy systems like you are describing, even if I generally don't agree with that decision, but I'm pretty confident that the use cases that you are describing @John-Nicholson are tied, nearly universally, to a scale that would already prompt a SAN-based infrastructure (or similar.)
Have you seen these in small environments where the scale did not exist to warrant a SAN otherwise?
Just a couple of months ago - I was contacted by a prospective client , who was looking to get his website designed ... So, I went over to his office one day, for a general face-to-face, and we got talking, and quite proudly mentioned about recently acquiring a Synology DS2015 box ... which was all pretty alright, until he mentioned why .. It turned out that their vendor recommended that they migrate their one Windows 2012 server to a VM, and that, if they WANTED RELIABILITY, SCALABILITY & PERFORMANCE, they would HAVE TO, move from a local storage to a NAS .. btw, their current total data size is a little less than 1TB ... They have around 40 users ... Now, for the cherry on the cake .. The vendor took-out the 2x2TB HDDs from the server, and reused them in the new NAS box. Apart from that, they installed another 2 TB HDD in the NAS box for "Backups" (Can you believe it, I could not ), and then installed a 128 GB HDD on the server, to install Hyper-V 2012. This , the vendor said would "further increase performance,, and that they did not have to buy new HDDs, which would save money" The VMs and data were on the NAS box ...
Upon, pointing-out and explaining the rather obvious flaws in this design, the client was left rather gobsmacked ... Anyway, I designed their website, and will be taking-over the support & maintenance of their IT, once the annual contract with the existing vendor runs it course.... I recommended, that they reattach the HDDs to the server, and run everything locally, and return or try to sell-off the DS2015 box, and get a smaller one, just for back-ups (VEEAM)... I hear, that the existing vendor, recently agreed to take back the DS2015, and compensate them by installing a lower-end 4 bay box, and by extending their service contract (I'm not sure if my client is going to agree to this) ....
Shocking, no ?
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@Veet said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
This is my quote from the original challenge: "We all (I hope by now) know that SANs have their place and a super obvious one that explains why enterprises use them almost universally and know why that usage has no applicability to normal SMBs - scale."
I agree with why lots of shops might deploy systems like you are describing, even if I generally don't agree with that decision, but I'm pretty confident that the use cases that you are describing @John-Nicholson are tied, nearly universally, to a scale that would already prompt a SAN-based infrastructure (or similar.)
Have you seen these in small environments where the scale did not exist to warrant a SAN otherwise?
Just a couple of months ago - I was contacted by a prospective client , who was looking to get his website designed ... So, I went over to his office one day, for a general face-to-face, and we got talking, and quite proudly mentioned about recently acquiring a Synology DS2015 box ... which was all pretty alright, until he mentioned why .. It turned out that their vendor recommended that they migrate their one Windows 2012 server to a VM, and that, if they WANTED RELIABILITY, SCALABILITY & PERFORMANCE, they would HAVE TO, move from a local storage to a NAS .. btw, their current total data size is a little less than 1TB ... They have around 40 users ... Now, for the cherry on the cake .. The vendor took-out the 2x2TB HDDs from the server, and reused them in the new NAS box. Apart from that, they installed another 2 TB HDD in the NAS box for "Backups" (Can you believe it, I could not ), and then installed a 128 GB HDD on the server, to install Hyper-V 2012. This , the vendor said would "further increase performance,, and that they did not have to buy new HDDs, which would save money" The VMs and data were on the NAS box ...
Upon, pointing-out and explaining the rather obvious flaws in this design, the client was left rather gobsmacked ... Anyway, I designed their website, and will be taking-over the support & maintenance of their IT, once the annual contract with the existing vendor runs it course.... I recommended, that they reattach the HDDs to the server, and run everything locally, and return or try to sell-off the DS2015 box, and get a smaller one, just for back-ups (VEEAM)... I hear, that the existing vendor, recently agreed to take back the DS2015, and compensate them by installing a lower-end 4 bay box, and by extending their service contract (I'm not sure if my client is going to agree to this) ....
Shocking, no ?
This is the same practice many SMB's experience every day. The IT Vendor clearly doesn't have an expert in house, just someone who gets paid to sell hardware with enough experience to setup some basic hardware.
I'm not shocked, and glad you were able to point out the issues. I didn't see what server they have that was scaled back to just a compute node though. . .
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@DustinB3403 said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@Veet said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
This is my quote from the original challenge: "We all (I hope by now) know that SANs have their place and a super obvious one that explains why enterprises use them almost universally and know why that usage has no applicability to normal SMBs - scale."
I agree with why lots of shops might deploy systems like you are describing, even if I generally don't agree with that decision, but I'm pretty confident that the use cases that you are describing @John-Nicholson are tied, nearly universally, to a scale that would already prompt a SAN-based infrastructure (or similar.)
Have you seen these in small environments where the scale did not exist to warrant a SAN otherwise?
Just a couple of months ago - I was contacted by a prospective client , who was looking to get his website designed ... So, I went over to his office one day, for a general face-to-face, and we got talking, and quite proudly mentioned about recently acquiring a Synology DS2015 box ... which was all pretty alright, until he mentioned why .. It turned out that their vendor recommended that they migrate their one Windows 2012 server to a VM, and that, if they WANTED RELIABILITY, SCALABILITY & PERFORMANCE, they would HAVE TO, move from a local storage to a NAS .. btw, their current total data size is a little less than 1TB ... They have around 40 users ... Now, for the cherry on the cake .. The vendor took-out the 2x2TB HDDs from the server, and reused them in the new NAS box. Apart from that, they installed another 2 TB HDD in the NAS box for "Backups" (Can you believe it, I could not ), and then installed a 128 GB HDD on the server, to install Hyper-V 2012. This , the vendor said would "further increase performance,, and that they did not have to buy new HDDs, which would save money" The VMs and data were on the NAS box ...
Upon, pointing-out and explaining the rather obvious flaws in this design, the client was left rather gobsmacked ... Anyway, I designed their website, and will be taking-over the support & maintenance of their IT, once the annual contract with the existing vendor runs it course.... I recommended, that they reattach the HDDs to the server, and run everything locally, and return or try to sell-off the DS2015 box, and get a smaller one, just for back-ups (VEEAM)... I hear, that the existing vendor, recently agreed to take back the DS2015, and compensate them by installing a lower-end 4 bay box, and by extending their service contract (I'm not sure if my client is going to agree to this) ....
Shocking, no ?
This is the same practice many SMB's experience every day. The IT Vendor clearly doesn't have an expert in house, just someone who gets paid to sell hardware with enough experience to setup some basic hardware.
I'm not shocked, and glad you were able to point out the issues. I didn't see what server they have that was scaled back to just a compute node though. . .
I don't think it's about lack of knowledge or experience ... I feel, it's just about unscrupulous business practice, of up-selling something ...
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Picked up a client.
2 epic dumb-assery things done by their "MSP"
Single server environment, 10-15 user office, very small. The original provider left RDP open to the internet with no AD security, no account lock outs, nothing.
Bad guys brute forced in, dropped ransomware on the server, took them down for a day and a half.
Same client, the outside company decided that UAC was causing issues, so they disabled it on every machine. So, I'm working remotely, nothing is responding to me when I give instructions whilst logged in as standard user, Can't log out....because....I can't elevate the session t'o run as admin....because I can't elevate anything to run as admin.
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@Veet said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@DustinB3403 said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@Veet said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
This is my quote from the original challenge: "We all (I hope by now) know that SANs have their place and a super obvious one that explains why enterprises use them almost universally and know why that usage has no applicability to normal SMBs - scale."
I agree with why lots of shops might deploy systems like you are describing, even if I generally don't agree with that decision, but I'm pretty confident that the use cases that you are describing @John-Nicholson are tied, nearly universally, to a scale that would already prompt a SAN-based infrastructure (or similar.)
Have you seen these in small environments where the scale did not exist to warrant a SAN otherwise?
Just a couple of months ago - I was contacted by a prospective client , who was looking to get his website designed ... So, I went over to his office one day, for a general face-to-face, and we got talking, and quite proudly mentioned about recently acquiring a Synology DS2015 box ... which was all pretty alright, until he mentioned why .. It turned out that their vendor recommended that they migrate their one Windows 2012 server to a VM, and that, if they WANTED RELIABILITY, SCALABILITY & PERFORMANCE, they would HAVE TO, move from a local storage to a NAS .. btw, their current total data size is a little less than 1TB ... They have around 40 users ... Now, for the cherry on the cake .. The vendor took-out the 2x2TB HDDs from the server, and reused them in the new NAS box. Apart from that, they installed another 2 TB HDD in the NAS box for "Backups" (Can you believe it, I could not ), and then installed a 128 GB HDD on the server, to install Hyper-V 2012. This , the vendor said would "further increase performance,, and that they did not have to buy new HDDs, which would save money" The VMs and data were on the NAS box ...
Upon, pointing-out and explaining the rather obvious flaws in this design, the client was left rather gobsmacked ... Anyway, I designed their website, and will be taking-over the support & maintenance of their IT, once the annual contract with the existing vendor runs it course.... I recommended, that they reattach the HDDs to the server, and run everything locally, and return or try to sell-off the DS2015 box, and get a smaller one, just for back-ups (VEEAM)... I hear, that the existing vendor, recently agreed to take back the DS2015, and compensate them by installing a lower-end 4 bay box, and by extending their service contract (I'm not sure if my client is going to agree to this) ....
Shocking, no ?
This is the same practice many SMB's experience every day. The IT Vendor clearly doesn't have an expert in house, just someone who gets paid to sell hardware with enough experience to setup some basic hardware.
I'm not shocked, and glad you were able to point out the issues. I didn't see what server they have that was scaled back to just a compute node though. . .
I don't think it's about lack of knowledge or experience ... I feel, it's just about unscrupulous business practice, of up-selling something ...
Stupidity, and there's multiple people to blame.
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Small business's are not blameless, they should seek good advice and consulting. When they hire people who they pay less per hour than geek squad this is what you get. By refusing to pay real consulting rates, this is what they end up getting...
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Small consulting shops that center around Hyper-V these days seem to be in love with building clusters on prosumer grade QNAP/synology etc. As there is no deal registration its not actually something they can "mark up" much. It does add a lot of labor, but you have to look at these shops training commitment (or often lack there of). They tend to be fed with cert mill grade MCSE's who learned out to make a Hyper-V cluster and Microsoft's storage curriculum emphasis this without ever discussing quality of storage. (Meanwhile a VCP 5.5 or newer will cover scale out local storage as there are quite a few VSAN questions on that test).
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There is a growing trend where the self taught IT guy in the SMB's knoledge is drifting farther and farther from the enterprise. The tools and best practices are making the "Cargo Cult of the Enterprise" even more dangerous.
As far as a shop with only a single server instance I'm starting to ask why even bother? Why not host the application, get as many of your apps delivered by SaaS, and leverage MDM/MAM/SSO tools and move away from the need for GPO or local domain for management.
Does doing this cost a little more? Sure. It does however give you a much more transparent cost to IT (Your not assuming risks because the SLA's are fairly well known and far more absolute from a SaaS provider these days than a server in a closet).
I think our real boogyman in the (S in SMB) is not the guy with the Synology but anyone advocating physically local servers at all. Servers with some exceptions for SME's or niche industries increasingly belong in datacenters.
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@John-Nicholson
@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@Veet said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@DustinB3403 said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@Veet said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
This is my quote from the original challenge: "We all (I hope by now) know that SANs have their place and a super obvious one that explains why enterprises use them almost universally and know why that usage has no applicability to normal SMBs - scale."
I agree with why lots of shops might deploy systems like you are describing, even if I generally don't agree with that decision, but I'm pretty confident that the use cases that you are describing @John-Nicholson are tied, nearly universally, to a scale that would already prompt a SAN-based infrastructure (or similar.)
Have you seen these in small environments where the scale did not exist to warrant a SAN otherwise?
Just a couple of months ago - I was contacted by a prospective client , who was looking to get his website designed ... So, I went over to his office one day, for a general face-to-face, and we got talking, and quite proudly mentioned about recently acquiring a Synology DS2015 box ... which was all pretty alright, until he mentioned why .. It turned out that their vendor recommended that they migrate their one Windows 2012 server to a VM, and that, if they WANTED RELIABILITY, SCALABILITY & PERFORMANCE, they would HAVE TO, move from a local storage to a NAS .. btw, their current total data size is a little less than 1TB ... They have around 40 users ... Now, for the cherry on the cake .. The vendor took-out the 2x2TB HDDs from the server, and reused them in the new NAS box. Apart from that, they installed another 2 TB HDD in the NAS box for "Backups" (Can you believe it, I could not ), and then installed a 128 GB HDD on the server, to install Hyper-V 2012. This , the vendor said would "further increase performance,, and that they did not have to buy new HDDs, which would save money" The VMs and data were on the NAS box ...
Upon, pointing-out and explaining the rather obvious flaws in this design, the client was left rather gobsmacked ... Anyway, I designed their website, and will be taking-over the support & maintenance of their IT, once the annual contract with the existing vendor runs it course.... I recommended, that they reattach the HDDs to the server, and run everything locally, and return or try to sell-off the DS2015 box, and get a smaller one, just for back-ups (VEEAM)... I hear, that the existing vendor, recently agreed to take back the DS2015, and compensate them by installing a lower-end 4 bay box, and by extending their service contract (I'm not sure if my client is going to agree to this) ....
Shocking, no ?
This is the same practice many SMB's experience every day. The IT Vendor clearly doesn't have an expert in house, just someone who gets paid to sell hardware with enough experience to setup some basic hardware.
I'm not shocked, and glad you were able to point out the issues. I didn't see what server they have that was scaled back to just a compute node though. . .
I don't think it's about lack of knowledge or experience ... I feel, it's just about unscrupulous business practice, of up-selling something ...
Stupidity, and there's multiple people to blame.
-
Small business's are not blameless, they should seek good advice and consulting. When they hire people who they pay less per hour than geek squad this is what you get. By refusing to pay real consulting rates, this is what they end up getting...
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Small consulting shops that center around Hyper-V these days seem to be in love with building clusters on prosumer grade QNAP/synology etc. As there is no deal registration its not actually something they can "mark up" much. It does add a lot of labor, but you have to look at these shops training commitment (or often lack there of). They tend to be fed with cert mill grade MCSE's who learned out to make a Hyper-V cluster and Microsoft's storage curriculum emphasis this without ever discussing quality of storage. (Meanwhile a VCP 5.5 or newer will cover scale out local storage as there are quite a few VSAN questions on that test).
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There is a growing trend where the self taught IT guy in the SMB's knoledge is drifting farther and farther from the enterprise. The tools and best practices are making the "Cargo Cult of the Enterprise" even more dangerous.
As far as a shop with only a single server instance I'm starting to ask why even bother? Why not host the application, get as many of your apps delivered by SaaS, and leverage MDM/MAM/SSO tools and move away from the need for GPO or local domain for management.
Does doing this cost a little more? Sure. It does however give you a much more transparent cost to IT (Your not assuming risks because the SLA's are fairly well known and far more absolute from a SaaS provider these days than a server in a closet).
I think our real boogyman in the (S in SMB) is not the guy with the Synology but anyone advocating physically local servers at all. Servers with some exceptions for SME's or niche industries increasingly belong in datacenters.
Yep... I agree - Small Businesses are not blameless .. . For some, it's as if, it's a matter of pride, that they have a NAS or SAN ... Most small businesses will opt for vendors who come cheap ...This is what I say to them "You throw peanuts, you'll attract only monkeys"
Where, I don't agree with you - Shift to a hosted SaaS based platform ...been there .. done that .. failed ... does not work, where I am ... Primarily due to poor bandwidth quality... I have a few clients, with factories in areas, where no ISP even wants to provide service ..
Hosting with local data centers is an expensive affair over here (India) ... If we were to host in US/Europe data centers (which work-out to be cheaper), then the issue of latency arises ..
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Give us 3-4 months and i'll put you in contact with our MSP as they will be trying to sell us some hardware and SAN with a refresh, even after i've suggested better like Scale
Might be suggesting a 3rd party review of the solution so look out for an E-mail NTG
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I think one thing that is important to mention is that the term SAN as used in this topic refers to a single storage node upon which all of your data rests.
Back 7 or 8 years ago when I first started learning about SAN systems, I was shocked that people would only build or buy based on a single unit, without understanding that if that single unit died, they were dead in the water.
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@hobbit666 said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
Give us 3-4 months and i'll put you in contact with our MSP as they will be trying to sell us some hardware and SAN with a refresh, even after i've suggested better like Scale
Might be suggesting a 3rd party review of the solution so look out for an E-mail NTG
Do you have a write up of common purchasing mistakes to hand to management before hand?
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@travisdh1 said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@hobbit666 said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
Give us 3-4 months and i'll put you in contact with our MSP as they will be trying to sell us some hardware and SAN with a refresh, even after i've suggested better like Scale
Might be suggesting a 3rd party review of the solution so look out for an E-mail NTG
Do you have a write up of common purchasing mistakes to hand to management before hand?
I think @scottalanmiller could contribute a few points to that one as well!
