Best posts made by StrongBad

I like Gmail, but it took a long time to get used to it when I first started using it. You can't just dive in. You really need to grok Google's vision for the interface and be willing to work in that way or it will fight you... and you will lose.

http://gizmodo.com/sad-blackberry-will-stop-making-phones-1787177777

I know this is tragic for all of our Blackberry users.

Has anyone worked with Skype for Business and had it be able to get it to automatically populate users' clients with a list of the people in the organization? It would be nice if they did not have to search but had the company's own list pushed into a group of some sort. Right now everyone has to do searches for each person that they want to talk to and add them to lists on their own. It is very manual, rather error prone (as it seems to search things other than just the Skype for Business directory and gets the wrong accounts often) and just causes people to not use it making the system go idle and be a waste.

I think if people could easily just see a list of who is in the company it would do wonders for getting adoption to take off. This is probably something easy that I have just not figured out how to do.

Hosted on Office 365, if that matters.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-lower-azure-pricing/

As part of our continued commitment to deliver Azure to customers at the best possible prices, effective October 1st, we are lowering prices on many of our most popular virtual machines (VMs). The rest of this blog covers key highlights, but if you are ready to learn more, please check out our redesigned website that makes it easier for you identify the VM categories that map to your use cases and find their prices across our regions.

Here is the summary of the changes:

• General Purpose Instances: Prices of our Dv2 series VMs will be reduced by up to 15%. We are also lowering prices of our A1 and A2 Basic VMs by up to 50%.
• Compute Optimized Instances: Prices of our F series will be reduced up to 11%.
• Av2 series: In November 2016, we will introduce new A series virtual machines (Av2), with prices up to 36% lower than the A series Standard VM prices available today.

In case you’re not familiar with our VM categories, A series VMs are our entry-level compute tier. Dv2 series VMs are our general-purpose tier, with more memory and local SSD storage than A series. F series VMs provide an even higher CPU-to-memory ratio with a lower price than the Dv2 series.

In addition to these reduced prices, for customers using Windows Server with Software Assurance, our recently announced Microsoft Azure Hybrid Use Benefit can help you run Windows Server workloads at 41% lower cost. Starting today, we’re also offering a set of images in our gallery that make it even easier to deploy Windows Server VMs in this way.

We’re excited about what these changes mean for customers and the value they can realize from Azure.

$280 for genuine Dell 4TB NL-SAS with the tray and everything.

Youtube Video

$350 for the 3TB NL-SAS drives, I'm thinking that it would be better to just stick with the 4TB ones.

@dafyre said in Barracuda Borks Firewalls with Automatic Update:

@StrongBad said in Barracuda Borks Firewalls with Automatic Update:

@dafyre said in Barracuda Borks Firewalls with Automatic Update:

@StrongBad said in Barracuda Borks Firewalls with Automatic Update:

That's ridiculous. Anyone heard if a fix is available yet? This is a lot of downtime. Anyone with this issue would have had to have replaced their firewall by now.

If I were a Barracuda customer, I would be looking for a new vendor, even after the fix was available!

That's just unacceptable.

I think you'd be looking long before one was available!

If it were me, an IPTables firewall/router is easy enough for emergency deployments.

Lots of things are. Even a Cisco ASA is easy to toss in quickly.

So I'm bored and looking into drive options. Here is another one...

1TB NL-SAS 2.5" drive. This would work in the other R720xd with the 25x 2.5" drives. They are $260 so this would cost a lot more but let you go for performance by having lots of drives. But that would more than double the storage cost and I think only RAID 6 is an option to get enough to fit into the chassis. So other than more spindles it does not work out very well. Still just 7200 RPM NL-SAS so not super fast.

LTO-6 does 160MB/s and LTO-7 does 300MB/s. That's 2.4Gb/s! And that is a single tape, they can be parallelized just like disks.

LTO-8 is going to be 427MB/s and is due soon. And that's a small leap, the speeds for LTO-9 are just crazy.

Here is the more interesting small drive option: 900GB 10K SAS 2.5" for $280. You would need even more of these and they are not cheap per GB but they are a lot faster than the NL-SAS options.

25 of these in an R720xd would be $7,000 just for the drives in one of the two servers. So that is the entire budget just for drives. With RAID 10 you could get 10.8TB, so not enough to even consider it. RAID 6 would be the only option and that would be 20.7TB which is plenty. So you could use one of the drives as a hot spare or buy a few fewer drives to save money, but then you would be losing performance again.

Just get out there and get started. The hardest part is getting the ball rolling.

1.8TB 10K SAS 2.5" drives. This would fix the RAID 10 issue, but it is NOT cheap. That's not a good option.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28367198

A container of Lego pieces went overboard and they are washing up on the beach in England! Hot day for beach combers.

Okay, I think that we have a pretty good round up of the options at this point. Until we have more information from the OP, like if there is more money, new requirements or specific disk requirements this seems to be the consensus:

Solution 1: The bare bones, cost saving solution is a two node Dell R510 or R720xd with 8x 4TB NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 (add drives as needed for performance up to 12) cluster. The 4TB 3.5" drives are just too cheap to not use and RAID 10 probably makes them the reasonably fast choice even though they are NL-SAS rather than 10K. Use HyperV and StarWind to do the clustering and failover. Might be able to come in somewhere around the assumed budget limits.

Solution 2: The expensive but easy approach. Scale with three nodes and everything included (hyperconverged) in a single package. A fraction of the work to set up or to maintain. Will grow easily in the future. Likely far more expensive than the OP can justify.

I feel like you guys are just talking past each other. WSUS itself is free but requires a Windows license. That's all that needed to be said at the beginning and I think none of that thread would have occurred.

Are you including the warranty and support in the "double" the cost numbers? Because that is where most of the money normally goes.

It's called fasting because of how you eat when it is over.

@BRRABill said:

As the keeper of the IT purse here, I've been proud we'll lasted so long on 10 years old servers.

Oh no, you did it now. You are forever to be known as the "Purse Keeper."

Congratulations. Quite the crew over there I hear.