I understand. If anything goes down, the company and doctors can't work. However it hasn't happened yet and therefore it is considered back burner stuff. rolling eyes. They provide the program over the internet and yet they still haven't allowed a secondary/backup ISP. We have a dual Wan router ready and waiting for the backup internet connection. Of course if they move to the data center, then it will have the ISP redundancy.

@alexntg

RTO and RPO are points I bring up constantly, of course I call it business continuity/disaster planning, which we have none.

I have AM and PM daily backups, which overwrite every few days, using fBackup program.

300%

I had a thought earlier today about the lag and stress on the hard drives.

They are constantly scanning PDF's (usually 3 people from 8-5) into the directories while users are trying to access the drives for their data. I wonder if we should be looking to the programmers to code the program to allow our "PDF" files to be on a server that doesn't have the files to run the program. That would free up some hard drive access.

@alexntg said:

@Nara said:

Was that a consultant, or a Dell rep? Tossing a SAN at something's typically something I see from resellers. From what you've explained, it sounds like you're short on IOPS. With the modern technologies available for localized and distributed tiered storage, SAN wouldn't be the way to go. What's your RTO for these systems?

I smell an opportunity for 3 ESXi hosts and VMWare vSAN, or 2 hosts with flash storage and Veeam cross-host replication.

What? By the way what is the cost of NTG running performance gathering metrics or is this something I can do?

@Dashrender said:

@technobabble said:

@Dashrender - my business has provided all their IT services since 2009. No one is doing anything but pretending to know what to do. Personally I don't think they would pay for performance gathering metrics but I would be interested in the cost.

If you have provided them all of the IT services since 2009, why are they even talking to someone in a Datacenter? Do they no longer trust you? Did a vendor send them a wine basket and now they feel intrigued by them?
Seems like a bad situation, best of luck with it. Situations like this definitely test your metal. If your company wants to keep them, you'll have to go the extra mile to show them why the other solutions being suggested are actually worse for them than your current ones, as well as what other solutions would be better.

The silent partner is becoming involved. This has been an on-going discussion for the last 2 years. First it was just move the servers from the office in FL to the data center in Maine. Then it was host in Tampa or near by. Questions of why is is so expensive to buy new equipment. Can't one server rule them all for $2k? So between the pressure of the NOT so silent partner they have reached out the IT guy from the bank. Trust is not the issue, its the price. Always has been for everything.

@Nara
RDS

@Dashrender - my business has provided all their IT services since 2009. No one is doing anything but pretending to know what to do. Personally I don't think they would pay for performance gathering metrics but I would be interested in the cost.
@Nara - "consultants" I believe the one at the datacenter is a consulting or IT person
@scottalanmiller - SAN was a possible add from one consultant, in 2010 CDW sent me someone at IBM/Lenovo who wanted to sell me a SAN (this was before the larger data sets)
@hutchingsp - I don't know how to do that.

I know I can just sit back and wait for the bomb to go off when they do this without me, but I would really rather have the saving play put together and have delivered it to the client before they spend money and it makes it worse. If they decline, at least they will know I tried to get them the best information.

@alexntg Thanks for legal info, I didn't realize that.

I finally moved my OneNote to OneDrive for business. Weird that OD is inside SharePoint or something strange like that. I had to do a convoluted dance to get OneDrive for business to show up on my W8.1. I saved the websites in Evernote that helped me get there.

Thanks @scottalanmiller and others. I will add it to my list of must haves for this client.

The IT consultant is going to take all the servers and put them in a new box via virtualization and because they will be adding a SAN this will make the LOB program run faster than it does now.

So let me tell you about a project I have been working on since 2009. Pomis is a medical practice management program which my client (billing office) uses. This program is uses flat files instead of a database. Also the program stores PDF s of claims, payments and other important information. A Pomis directory can be as small as 500MB without any PDF files but can grow to 91GB.

Each medical practice that the billing company takes care of uses their own Pomis Directory. Basically I create a folder named for the doctors practice. This folder will have all the Pomis files in it to run the program. Each practice may have up to 4 users accessing data from the billing company and the doctors practice could have 1-8 users accessing data.

AD/File Server (odds and ends)
Dell PE2850: Xeon 3GHz (2 procs) 8GB RAM Server 08r2 RAID 1 2x 146GB USCSI RAID 5 3x 146SCSI (only minor usage as a file server on the RAID 5 (more like a storage space for users to share internal office information)

LOB Servers (amount of directories are related to the size of storage) run OS and Remote Desktop Services and LOB software.
Dell RE1950: Xeon 5160 @ 3GHz (2 procs) 4GB RAM Server 08r2 Big RAID 10 4 146GB SAS 10k drives
Dell PE2950: Xeon 5160 @ 3GHz (2 procs) 8GB RAM Server 08r2 Big RAID 10 4 750GB SATA 7.2k drives
Gateway E-9525R: Xeon 5130 @ 2GHz (1 proc) 6GB RAM Server 2012 Big RAID 10 6 x 750 SATA 7.2k drives

Actual data size for all servers is 656GB.

The owners procured the older units for a song which is why I get to use them. I add servers as the disk space and the hard drive usage goes up. Each time I have moved practices off of one server to another, the server with less data improved performance. I pretty much have the data equal distributed among the servers.

When complaints of slowness or temporary white screens (pre-cursor to a not responding incident) I would watch the Resource monitor and noticed that the CPU and Memory was almost always 50-60% usage while the disk was a solid block of green. Although doctors and billing staff (day and night shift) access the servers 24/7, there are low load times when i see the CPU is at 4% and Memory is at 30% usage and I can actually see the disk graph. This led me to believe that I was having I/O issues and that by adding more drives via servers I was addressing the I/O issues.

I recently spoke to the IT consultant who will be suggesting the hardware which will be in data center. He asked a few questions about the servers and confirmed no Exchange and that there was not a SQL database and was like ok, thanks for the information. I asked if he wanted to know about the program and tried to give him some information. After I explained the pain points I was having. He said, first you need a new faster server with more processors and RAM and we will visualize all the servers and use a SAN and that will work.

Enough of what I think, although I believe working on this since 2009 I would have some insight, perhaps I am mistaken in my diagnosis of the problems. What say you peeps (Easter reference again - BAM!)?

From what I read it was available in the last Exchange version but not the newest one. I would like to say on a tablet having to expand each folder and sub folder to find if there is mail it quite annoying and not good use of time.

However this has changed the way I use Outlook for the better. I am moving more to OneNote and Evernote for archiving and plan on using rules for mail that can wait a day or two to be read.

Does anyone else actually create folders in folders while using Outlook?

Seems my main beef with OWA is that you can't see if you have mail if it is more than one level deep as seen in the screen shot in the above post. Cron Jobs is one folder level deep from inbox and the folder Cron is nestled 2 folders deep in the Our Web Server folder.

The irony is that I was EXPECTING OWA to act DIFFERENTLY than Outlook. In Outlook there is the same issue with nestled folders and to combat that, one can add a Favorite called Unread Mail which shows the folders that have unread mail in them and OWA doesn't have it.

So until someone has a way to mimic the favorite "unread mail" I will refrain from creating any rules.

Fantastic information peeps...lol..peeps...its Easter! Hope everyone had a good day!

Server desktops to use a Medical Billing program and scheduler.

40 of the users are contracted workers or doctors offices, would that sway you to add Pertino?

So by using Pertino, I would not need a hardware VPN? And how vulnerable is RDP without VPN?

@scottalanmiller said:

@IT-ADMIN said:

it is a better practice to create OU for computers and OU for users, this separation will help you in dealing with computer and user configuration, then create and link group policy to your OUs, you will get a nice AD structure

And different OUs for servers and desktops too.

That makes sense, Now to plan my mods to the AD!

A client is moving their hardware to a data center. I would like to secure the RDP sessions. Right now there are about 50 RDP users that login over the internet. I have seen people posting about using Petrino and RDP together. Is there anything else I need?

@Hubtech I hope it works for you and hopefully you will have time write up a review of the product for the Mangoladdies and Mangolassies!