Posts made by StorageNinja

The planet a really long time ago was a Dell shop (like8-10 years). Softlayer is a supermicro shop, and stayed that way after IBM bought them. Shortly after this IBM sold off the X servers.

@scottalanmiller Softlayer will offer someone with a few hundred a month 24/7 service. If your wanting burst API driven bare metal with over 20 pops around the world who would you use?

Soft layer throws in monitoring, and free private transit between their pops so when comparing price to something else its kinda apples/oranges to look at raw costs vs. someone like AWS who charges per GB even between zones.

But are your logs sexy?

http://www.sexilog.fr

LogInsight is also my "jam" in logs. You don't even need to learn regex...

@John-Nicholson One nice thing you get from using Softlayer for vSphere is you get a good mix of PaaS, mixed in with a HA/DRS available hosting for traditional app's that don't HA themselves.

There are a ton of applications out there with 10 users, that rebuilding the code for PaaS to do HA isn't worth it.

@thwr Correct

@scottalanmiller Softlayers main product is bare metal, I'd argue its a fairly common use case.

I would argue their VPS's tend to get used more for "developers gone wild" (Someone sticks a 3 tier app in a container on a single physical box) @#$@ than enterprise use cases. The amount of times I found a GIS server on a non-backed up softlayer VPS or server was bizarre.

@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

@johnhooks said:
IBM doesn't.

Cough Softlayer Cough.
In all seriousness they are a massive VMware shop. (Under VCAN, as well as customers just renting bare metal and putting ESXi on it).

@scottalanmiller

Even when you have support, try calling them on memorial day...
The other thing that makes SCCM Apples/Oranges against vSphere is upgrades.
When a new version comes out you have to buy it (or pay SA and have a EA for the 3-5 years between products). With vSphere free upgrades are tied to your support agreement (I know people with 7 year old vSphere licenses that they have upgraded keys on from 3-6).

Most enteprise applications (Oralce etc) do the same thing and tie upgrades to support. Microsoft charges you 20% a year for upgrades but leaves support to the customer/channel.

@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

VMware has a much better support reputation, of course, but pay as you go product support tends to be bad.

Its a lot easier to have a support reputation when you have a HCL, and you have signed agreements from the partners that they will support and ship firmware's for said hardware etc. The devil of any hypervisor is dealing with hardware and having someone's name in blood to hold over their head when their stuff breaks is handy...

@hobbit666 said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

@hobbit666 said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

I think the other issue is convincing others of the benefits of hypervisors like XenServer or Hyper-V. I want to use Hyper-V or Xen for 2 new hosts that will have Citrix XenApp running but convincing management to move from ESXi is a struggle but I think this also comes from our MSP that likes ESXi and pushes that even in the FREE version.

That bit comes down to getting management to recognize their buyer's agents from their seller's agents. Once they realize that their MSP is really a VAR and is trying to make a quick buck selling them something, it should change their perspective quickly.

Not that VMware is always bad and anyone pushing it is trying to make a quick buck; only that an MSP making money by selling VMware isn't a trustworthy decision maker in this scenario.

100% Agree - At the moment we are "reviewing" our ESXi farm that currently has a SAN, and we have outgrown it. Every time we talk the instant reaction is NEW SAN with some SSD's for SQL etc etc. I'm thinking no lets look at Hypercoverage or IaaS now

But yeah since I've started here and started to question things the IT manager has been a bit more on my side with thinking

To be fair, Flash drives are at ~50 cents per GB from Dell even, so unless your buying archive storage your getting flash today. Its why when looking at HCI I always say look for something where you can add drives later as this stuff gets cheaper/faster.

@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

Sorry, I keep misquoting the price. It's not $500/year. It is about $1,000 per year to get Basic support. Double what I was thinking.

Its only like $180 more to go from basic to production (24/7) for essentials plus.

There are other tiers of support that exist also that don't get as much attention...

BCS (Business Critical Support) Gives you a dedicated team (common in larger enterprises) among other benefits (TAM I think generally bundled at this level). Its like a co-pilot in that you'll have a team who knows your name (and you theirs). Only get a few people who are allowed to interface them on your side to keep it close. These guys don't sit in the normal queues and tend to be tied to a specific customer and maybe help with escalations in between things if I understand how they work. I don't think you ever see L1 people ever.

And the rare but prized "Mission Critical Support". Think this is a 250K minimum add-on, but it cuts your SLA from 1 hour to 30 minutes. I think you can also make people work non-production impacting cosmetic issues 24/7 and other crazy stuff.

VCAN also gets its own support perc's (Straight to L2).

For Oracle BCA Customers there is a secret hotline as Oracle gets weird on virtualization issues, and they will provide support to the app level or something crazy to keep Oracle at bay.

I think there might have been a special support org just for healthcare or something crazy also (Where every ticket can mean people dying, and applications like EPIC have bizarre needs).

Like all companies I assume there is a special federal queue for compliance/legal reasons etc.

http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/cat/categoryID.66412200?src=eBIZ_StoreHome_Featured_EssentialsPlus_US

@scottalanmiller said in Is the Time for VMware in the SMB Over?:

With 2012R2, MS is coming very close. And while you do need SCCM to manage a larger Hyper-V deployment, it can still come out cheaper than ESXi. I just did the math. I have 30 sockets of vSphere Enterprise. I license WIndows Datacenter anyway, so that is not a cost. If I was do do it over, it would cost me half in SCCM licenses for the same infrastructure as it does on vSphere licenses.
As far as moving to the cloud, Reliable, fast connectivity and storage ramp up pretty quickly.

One thing to note is SCCM licenses alone don't have enterprise support. You'll need an ELA a support agreement. 2016 will bring in per core licensing (Which I'm seeing will be anywhere from 25% to 100% increase in licensing costs). Microsoft is making a big cash grab hoping to push people to Azure is my assumption with this stuff.

@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

@John-Nicholson said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

If your business turns into a hosting business, then you have the challenge of deciding when IT stops and operations begins. That gets complicated quickly.

The opposite I see more often, and frankly more dangerous to your employment. IT focus's so much on what's in their immediate view (Risk Management and Cost Control) and don't focus on delivering things Ops needs (Agility). This is where Shadow IT comes from. If I have a terminal server that's slow to the point of being unusable, but its backed up and cheap because its still running windows 2003, IS it really available?
What happens when ops got a credit card and contracted a 3rd party citrix farm? I'd be more worried in a rapidly growing company with delivering the tools they need than trying to keep costs down (unless truly the capital expense doesn't deliver any value).

I've seen that a bit, as I was the head of shadow IT for a Fortune 10 once upon a time

I feel bad for our internal IT people......

The coolest blocker of shadow IT i've seen is having a SSO portal that you can register with major SaaS vendors (SAML etc). If someone tries to go buy something with a credit card and an email from our company it will redirect the request back to our internal. It lets you lock down services, but also lets users self provision and request them internally. It strangely makes me feel empowered, while at the same time stopping me from using Box or Slack without someone signing off that I need it and the charges getting routed properly.

@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

@stess said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

Your big challenge here, if you decide to pursue a counter to these recommendations, will be in properly assessing business need (if you feel that his designs are not in the best interest of the company then you should, in theory, be able to not just put that into words but be able to put it into numbers) and then communicating that effectively to the powers that be. This is where the average IT person fails hard - IT tends to attract people who struggle to be able to quantify, qualify and communicate IT in business terms. Maybe you are not one of these people, but if you work in IT the chances are extremely high that this is an area where you feel a particular challenge.

Thanks for the insight. I'll gather more information before making any decisions. These changes are estimated to take 6-8 months at least. I got time.
I will look at the link you posted and make a better judgmental decision. I am 110% against SAN and know there are alternatives that could deliver results with fraction of the cost. *cough starwind virtual SAN *cough

I'll see if I can have a quick talk with the management to give my input about all these changes. Obviously I am not going in empty hands.

Some strategies to have at the ready for your personal growth and/or leveraging of opportunity:

• Get VMware running at home and learn it inside and out. Make the new guy implementing your wheel house if he gets what he wants. That's only an example technology, apply this to all stated technologies. Your position gets stronger the better you are with his position.

http://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/
https://vmware.stanly.edu (Add yourself to the waitlist, you can get your VCP for $250 with the book, and under 200 w/o, normally a 3-5K priced class.

@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

If your business turns into a hosting business, then you have the challenge of deciding when IT stops and operations begins. That gets complicated quickly.

The opposite I see more often, and frankly more dangerous to your employment. IT focus's so much on what's in their immediate view (Risk Management and Cost Control) and don't focus on delivering things Ops needs (Agility). This is where Shadow IT comes from. If I have a terminal server that's slow to the point of being unusable, but its backed up and cheap because its still running windows 2003, IS it really available?
What happens when ops got a credit card and contracted a 3rd party citrix farm? I'd be more worried in a rapidly growing company with delivering the tools they need than trying to keep costs down (unless truly the capital expense doesn't deliver any value).

@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

@John-Nicholson said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

@scottalanmiller Going to disagree with you Scott. You need more than risk aversion (its only 1/3 of it).

Agility, Risk Mitigation, Cost Control are the 3 reasons you spend money on things in IT.

Take a bank. If all you cared about was risk aversion it would be a giant vault with snipers everywhere. Instead we recognize that having drive thru tellers is a better use of capital (Agility), and having managers and people who do audits to prevent fraud and loss (Cost control) is also worth funding.

I totally agree. The conversation that I'm trying to get him to kick off is the one about what is driving certain aspects of the spending. There are lots of great reasons to buy technology, but only certain ones can be driven by the financial department. The CFO's office drives technology investment around risk aversion. This is an investment mostly around cost avoidance or loss avoidance.

Agility, in your terminology, would be primarily driven not by the CFO's office but by the COO's office and the production / operations departments (the core business.) Unlike risk aversion, this is the value of opportunity and agility is a big part and so are other aspects. This is where we look to use technology to create more wealth, rather than hedging against losses.

The last year I did consulting I saw a huge acceleration in conversations with operations. Smart IT people learn ever nook and cranny of ops if they want to understand what should drive projects.

@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

@John-Nicholson said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

His changes may cost $100-200K in the span of 2-3 years.

To be clear, That's 30-60K a year. Less than a FTE for an IT position. Spending that on an infrastructure refresh in the grand scheme of things isn't that much money for an environment with more than 1 IT person...

It's not bad at all in that sense. The question really isn't "is this too much for a business to handle" but should be "what are we getting for that cost?" If there are good reasons for it, it's probably well justified.

Of course, probably the bigger question would be... "why so many IT people for a company of just 80 people?" Might be good reasons there too, but that is likely too many IT people per employee. At least for an average business.

I used to think this, then I met a demolition and recycling firm that the CEO told me IT was the most important part of their business. While I hate Gartner/IDC's terminology the "Digital transformation" where every business must ingrain IT functions in their company is having interesting impacts on IT staffing. Now You are right that a lot are over-hiring (or building massive development teams in house, rather than getting someone to build this stuff cheaper) but its crazy seeing guys who sell "rocks" for a living having a SaaS and micro bidding site that allows them to "Crush" their competition. I"ve seen a boring fleet management consulting company turn into an IT company when they realized they could take their process's they consulted on, turn them into apps, and host them and make that be the end game for their consulting engagements (develop hosted customers).

@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

@stess said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

Quick question: When would you justify Datacenter license for Windows Server 2012R2? Seem to be about having each VM running individual Windows server role.

Simple rule is when you need 14 or more VMs per node of Windows servers, then DC makes more sense than the alternatives. This is purely a financial licensing factor, not a technical one.

DC gives you the ability to split more workloads, though, so you tend to do somewhat bad things like condensing VMs until you have a DC license. So DC tends to make you behave better. DC is also much, much more flexible for disaster recovery for semi-obvious reasons.

This is going to change shortly as 2016 will involve core's in that calculation. If your buying 2012R2 with SA and the possibility of executing upgrade rights, keep this in mind...

@scottalanmiller Going to disagree with you Scott. You need more than risk aversion (its only 1/3 of it).

Agility, Risk Mitigation, Cost Control are the 3 reasons you spend money on things in IT.

Take a bank. If all you cared about was risk aversion it would be a giant vault with snipers everywhere. Instead we recognize that having drive thru tellers is a better use of capital (Agility), and having managers and people who do audits to prevent fraud and loss (Cost control) is also worth funding.

@stess All the changes (VMWare, terminal, VDI, SAN/NAS, switch, etc) he is proposing I once think of doing the same thing. However, at the time (last year) I did not deem it necessary and overkilled. We grew from 45 people company to 80ish people company within one year. If I have to reconsider those option now... I still think it is overkilled.

VDI is more about what it offers you (Unique desktop experience, anywhere at any time). I've seen companies with 12 people VDI make sense for. I've also seen companies with 500 who it didn't. If you have aggressive security/compliance needs and a highly mobile workforce then some type of remote end user compute solution is a better deal. Don't focus on "We are a SMB" focus on the important IT can have in delivering solutions and value. If these solutions mean you can increase productivity for field or operations by 10% that's 10% less staff which may be a cheap ROI for instance... As Scott Mentioned, learn what the business need is. That said if your doing VDI on VMware at that scale I'd argue a SAN/NAS isn't necessary (horizon Suite Includes VSAN).