Newb: Looking for advice.
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@popester said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
Our leadership really wants to get to "the cloud".
The use here doesn't imply IT's cloud computing in any way. "The cloud" has always, as was just pointed out above, meant literally nothing more than "hosted".
So the sole move that that terminology implies is leaving your premises to be hosted elsewhere. It doesn't imply cloud computing in any way.
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@scottalanmiller said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
Using a cloud to mean "the internet" was a graphical representation before IT had cloud computing. But it was not "a cloud", the unknown network was "the cloud." And yes, this is very old.
I'm very old myself, or at least I feel old in the morning, so there you go
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@notverypunny said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
Sounds like someone's taking to ML for a homework assignment?
This is very dustin'y of you to say.
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@scottalanmiller said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
This could mean so many things.
If they have a website, or email, etc, it's possible they are already "in the cloud".
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Our storage to host network is 10g Meraki. We run 100mb Avaya to our end users connect with Avaya 9608 sip phone passing through to Dell 3040 zero clients
Total of 3 Hosts:
• Hypervisor: VMware ESXi, 6.5.0
• Model: PowerEdge R730
• Processor Type: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v3 @ 2.60GHz
• Logical Processors: 144
• 383 gig
We run:
Citrix Studio
Citrix Systems, Inc.
Version: 7.15.2000.260
XenApp shared desktop, windows 10, 125 users
We have a 10gig host/storage network:
Here is a typical week of activity:
Hope this helps and hope i did not break any rules. Thank you.
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Sorry, I did not realize all of the great content posted. I am reading all of it now playing catch-up.. Thank you everyone.
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So the majority of your workloads are done via RDS or equivalent (XenApp / XenDesktop)?
Something that is often done is moving to colocation and maintaining your general infrastructure, but doing so "out of house". So that would be fully in "the cloud" without the disaster of trying to re-architect your applications to work on "a cloud."
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@scottalanmiller said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
So the majority of your workloads are done via RDS or equivalent (XenApp / XenDesktop)?
Exactly.
I most certainly have more questions for sure, once I digest what you have given below.
Again, thank you.
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@scottalanmiller said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
Something that is often done is moving to colocation and maintaining your general infrastructure, but doing so "out of house". So that would be fully in "the cloud" without the disaster of trying to re-architect your applications to work on "a cloud."
So other than site resiliency what does he gain? Assuming he would have to put some decent pipes between the colo and his office, that could really raise the IT expenses. What's the off-set to make that worthwhile?
Now I know you've said in the past that power consumption, etc was actually cheaper in a DC, than at home/office - plus they (the DC) also likely provides UPS and other power backup options, etc... of course, we don't know about that part of the OP's setup either.
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@Dashrender said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
So other than site resiliency what does he gain?
The "goal" here is to satisfy a political requirement. The "gain" is "meeting the goal."
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@Dashrender said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
What's the off-set to make that worthwhile?
Power, bench, HVAC, and equipment life span. Equipment in colo uses their power, not yours, that's often significant. Getting 24x7 bench support as part of the cost is huge. Not having to provide HVAC is huge. And the above tend to give you longer life spans on your gear.
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@Dashrender said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
Assuming he would have to put some decent pipes between the colo and his office, that could really raise the IT expenses.
Well, just don't make that assumption. Almost no one needs this in the real world, so it's a pretty bad assumption to throw in. Worth asking if it might come up, absolutely. But as an assumption, it's really bad.
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@Dashrender said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
Now I know you've said in the past that power consumption, etc was actually cheaper in a DC,
It's included in the price, so whether it costs them more or less is irrelevant to you as the decision maker. What you care about is math like this...
Cost to operate server X in my office? Power + HVAC + Office space = $35/mo
Cost to place server in colocation? $50/mo
Uplift to colo? $15/mo
Do the features of colo come out to $15 or more of value to your business? That's all that matters. How they make it cheap is their business and has nothing to do with us.
Now in many cases, colo actually comes out cheaper. So that becomes really easy to justify then. But when it doesn't, you have to look at the soft benefits to decide.
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An often large benefit to going to colo is reducing the need for high cost ISP connections to sites. Because without colo we often have to host services out of end point ISP drops at high cost, but with colo we normally only use low cost consumption bandwidth.
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@scottalanmiller said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
An often large benefit to going to colo is reducing the need for high cost ISP connections to sites. Because without colo we often have to host services out of end point ISP drops at high cost, but with colo we normally only use low cost consumption bandwidth.
Colo is better than on-prem for sure. There is more expertise required than going with IaaS for basic setups as you must manage a hypervisor. You can introduce elasticity into a colo just like you can with true IaaS but it is more work and obviously is not as fault tolerant as you can spread through AZs or regions quickly and easily with IaaS.
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If his needs can be met with PaaS it becomes even more benefecial to go cloud. Like if he wants to run database servers or spin up web servers there is no maintenance that needs to be done.
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So my initial comment was meant to be more tongue-in-cheek than anything, I wasn't trying to bash or belittle anyone, my apologies if it wasn't taken as intended.
I'm seeing a lot of advice that seems to be based on assumptions.
My first order of business in your shoes would be to understand the reasons for the current situation
- Why does the outgoing person have such an anti-cloud bias
- What does management mean by "get to the cloud".
The information you've given helps explain the current IT reality of the company. My concern would be that if management has SaaS in mind as opposed to migrating the existing workloads then looking at colo would seem to be a moot point. You've mentioned Citrix, which makes me wonder if they're looking to do Citrix Cloud.
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@notverypunny said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
My first order of business in your shoes would be to understand the reasons for the current situation
Why does the outgoing person have such an anti-cloud bias
What does management mean by "get to the cloud".This is the underlying problem. No one should be "anti-cloud" or "pro-cloud". Both cases are an emotional reaction to a technical business decision. This purely comes down to risk, cost, and capability. Any emotional response here is unprofessional in both a business and an IT context. Why would management have the slightest interest in the resulting decision? And why did management have apparently little interesting in the emotional crippling of a department previously?
Sounds like they are ignoring the actual issue (bad organizational thinking) and focusing on something in the weeds (buzzwords.)
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@notverypunny said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
You've mentioned Citrix, which makes me wonder if they're looking to do Citrix Cloud.
Still just XenApp, just hosted by Citrix.
