Migrate to DFS from UNC file shares? Complications..
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I see that, good point. However, its a moot point.
Essentially, this is same info he's provided before (verbally) in meetings. When I brought up the information, data, quotes and our capacity and have asked for company forecasting; it goes back into a queue of 'timelines and priorities'.
I'm just over it, when I feel I have no control or say to better the technology needs. The fact we had downtime last week.
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@ntoxicator As to the email though, that sounds 100% like a response I would expect. There is nothing that is unreasonable about any of that. For anything over $2500, we have to submit a breakdown of all those things that were mentioned, and a little more, to the engineering manager. Anything over $5000 goes to the director of IT. Anything over $20,000 goes to the VP of operations. To simplify things, we now just report to the VP of ops. But nonethelss, we still have to do a breakdown and submit it for approval. It ensures quality, return on investment, and that everything is being vetted through the proper channels.
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If that wasn't the response coming from someone that high up, I would be deeply concerned.
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What you really need is a template. Let me see what I can find from something I previously submitted.
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@BBigford said:
bmit it for approval. It ensures quality, return on investment, and that everything is being vetted through the proper channels.
Not knowing the prior history - that response from your CEO looks promising. If he won't give you numbers, then just make them up, it's that easy. You've been there for 8 years, you have a rough idea of what the growth has been over the past 5, so use that. If you determine that your growth has been 20% year over year, you can design a system based on where you are today for 3, 5, 8 years down the road. Of course something could change and it could be over kill, or they could come back in a year and say - WTF why are you asking for more stuff already - you point to your projections and then ask them.. why didn't you tell me the projections changed?
I find myself in your exact shoes - building presentations are something I've never been good at. It's a struggle for me.. but I'm working on it.
It's pretty easy to report on where you are today, now you need to make some guesses on where you'll be tomorrow. They don't need to be perfect, but you need a reason for them to be what you claim them to be.
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@BBigford said:
What you really need is a template. Let me see what I can find from something I previously submitted.
Mind sharing that with me too?
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So you need something that has the basics:
*Purpose
*Scope
*Policy
*Price
etcFor instance, when it was proposed what acceptable encryption policies would be, the following was written:
Acceptable Encryption Policy
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Purpose.
The purpose of this policy is to limit the use of Encryption by Authorized Users to methods that receive substantial public review and work effectively. Additionally, this policy provides direction to ensure compliance with Federal regulations, and to ensure legal authority is granted for the dissemination and use of Encryption technologies outside of the United States. -
Scope.
This policy applies to all Authorized Users including <company name> employees and affiliates. -
Policy.
Proven, standard Encryption methods (e.g. DES, Blowfish, RSA, RC5, IDEA, etc.) must be used as the basis for Encryption technologies. These methods represent the actual Cipher used for an approved application. For example, Network Associate's Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) technology uses the IDEA method in combination with RSA or Diffie-Hellman methods, while Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology uses RSA Encryption. Symmetric Cryptosystem key lengths must be at least 128 bits. Asymmetric Cryptosystem keys must be of a length that yields equivalent strength.
Authorized Users may not use Proprietary Encryption Algorithms for any purpose, unless reviewed by qualified experts outside of the vendor in question and approved by Information Security personnel. Be aware that the export of Encryption technologies is restricted by the U.S. Government. Residents of countries other than the United States need to be aware of the Encryption technology laws of the country in which they reside. -
Enforcement.
Any Authorized User found to be in violation of this policy will be considered an Unauthorized User, and as such are subject to disciplinary action pursuant with the Enforcement section of the Unauthorized Use Policy.
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@Dashrender said:
@BBigford said:
What you really need is a template. Let me see what I can find from something I previously submitted.
Mind sharing that with me too?
I couldn't find one from an item that was purchased as quickly. I'm still looking.
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0_1459973847883_Project Plan Template.docx
I found a project plan template. That one is a bit more extensive than you probably need. But it gives you a general idea of things you should put on a template.
*Brief overview of the project
*How much is this going to cost?
*Why do we need this?
*What is going to really change, what differences will we see?
*Who's signing off on this?
*Are there alternatives? If so, why is this being proposed?
*How long will this take to implement?
*What are some constraints we can predict and how will those be overcome?
*Who is this affecting? (scope)Just stuff like that...
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Big thanks for everyone with that insight.
Yeah - i've been here 8 years and have seen alot of growth. Although, unfortunately, treats it as a smaller business than what it should be. I try to keep a close relationship with CEO as when the company was smaller.
They refuse to give IT a budget. I seen on paper they only gave IT a 5,000 budget for year of 2015. I questioned it, and said there were other needs. I said, our new computer purchases blew past that already.
CEO wants to grow company to 250 employee's by 2017. And 50-100 employee's year after. These are projections I've had. But I can see him wanting a more formal proposal and outline.
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Oh, and milestones if it is a big project that will take numerous amounts of funding. Like if a project has to pull from multiple budgets at different times, what budget is going to fund which parts?
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@ntoxicator said:
CEO wants to grow company to 250 employee's by 2017. And 50-100 employee's year after.
That... I don't agree with that...
You don't grow because you want to, you grow out of necessity. Projections for employee growth are done because you see the services of a company expanding, more clientele, etc.
The way you worded that, makes it sound like the CEO thinks a successful company is one that has lots of employees. If many things are autonomous, you can cut down on employees.
Maybe I'm taking what you said out of context, or it wasn't worded properly.
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They were prospecting and projecting employee's based upon client acquisition/intake through the years. Employee prospects based upon average number of people to support X number of customers...
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@ntoxicator said:
They were prospecting and projecting employee's based upon client acquisition/intake through the years. Employee prospects based upon average number of people to support X number of customers...
Ok, that's what I was hoping. That I merely took what you said out of context.
Honest to God, I've heard employers before talk about growth as more of a want. Hiring lots of employees because they (the employer) thought more staff could draw more customers. That was completely backwards thinking and cost them dearly.
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@ntoxicator said:
Big thanks for everyone with that insight.
Yeah - i've been here 8 years and have seen alot of growth. Although, unfortunately, treats it as a smaller business than what it should be. I try to keep a close relationship with CEO as when the company was smaller.
They refuse to give IT a budget. I seen on paper they only gave IT a 5,000 budget for year of 2015. I questioned it, and said there were other needs. I said, our new computer purchases blew past that already.
CEO wants to grow company to 250 employee's by 2017. And 50-100 employee's year after. These are projections I've had. But I can see him wanting a more formal proposal and outline.
It looks like you have some solid numbers to base at least two years worth of growth on already, not even numbers you had to invent - ones they gave you.
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@Dashrender said:
@ntoxicator said:
@Dashrender said:
64 GB RAM - is that all? My little server has 64, my big one has 120 GB, and you can easily buy servers today that will hold 512 GB + RAM. As for your storage, well, yeah - you have a storage problem. You just need to solve it. You might need more storage than a single typical server chassis can handle (though you can buy HPE and Dell servers that hold something like 18 drives - so you'd need some pretty crazy storage before you'd climb over that and need to go to DAS or NAS or SAN)
@Dashrender : this was also an example. To be all honest, We would actually need over 128GB of ram, and of-course the storage size to suite our needs.
I considered a XenServer HA setup with a HA setup for Network SAN units. Other users on here have bashed me for this idea and suggested a setup similar to Scale Computing (Where storage is local to servers).
Sux if someone bashed you here on ML - we try to be better than that other forum. That said, talking frankly and asking you to think critically is something most push for here at ML, sadly this comes off as bashing. That said, yeah I know bashing does still actually happen here on ML.
Scale is definitely a good solution, but it's not for everyone. it's not cheap to get into, $25K to start. Another option would be StarWinds vSAN software with Hyper-V (starwinds is free for 2 nodes if you are in SpiceWorks) or DRBD with XenServer (software is all free).
Yup. We don't officially support free on Xen (demand is too low) but if you're somebody who's interested just drop me a line and we'll do a custom key for you.
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Keep in mind it's a CFO and CEO job to limit the spending of the company and keep profits up. It's your job to show how spending this money will provide good ROI. As I see it they are doing they're job. They should question your purchasing and you need to defend it and sell it better
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Understood. I know ROI and TCO.. I've explained this to the CEO and asked him numerous times what his expectations are. What are the costs of downtime to him and the company?
Again, posted over 7m gross in 2015.. for a company of over 100 employee's. I don't see how would be such an issue to investigate new purchases. Also considering the fact, building a new 112,000 square foot facility to be moved into end of 2017 - although i have my doubts on being that soon.
Anyways, besides the fact of original posting. Essentially, DFS will not work for us due to file locks. I'm waiting to see if we can purchase an intel atom D525 server for this satellite office, or even a super micro i3 server that will run 2008 R2.... only will have ~20 employee's there.
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@ntoxicator said:
Understood. I know ROI and TCO.. I've explained this to the CEO and asked him numerous times what his expectations are. What are the costs of downtime to him and the company?
Again, posted over 7m gross in 2015.. for a company of over 100 employee's. I don't see how would be such an issue to investigate new purchases. Also considering the fact, building a new 112,000 square foot facility to be moved into end of 2017 - although i have my doubts on being that soon.
Gross doesn't really mean much. That's not counting the companies expenses. 100 employees isn't very big. were in the realm of 35,000 employees (with 1.6 Billion in Net profit this quarter) . We still have to be able to defend why were buying stuff.
Have you given hard numbers? to what this costs the company to have an what impact not having it will do? What systems are you quoting them to meet the business need?
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@ntoxicator said:
Anyways, besides the fact of original posting. Essentially, DFS will not work for us due to file locks. I'm waiting to see if we can purchase an intel atom D525 server for this satellite office, or even a super micro i3 server that will run 2008 R2.... only will have ~20 employee's there.
a NAS would be a better option than an intel atom or core i3 running windows server..
Why would you be installing a new server as 2008 R2? that's quite old now.
