Never Let the Vendor Set Up a Server
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@Carnival-Boy said:
What risk?
As an example that comes up over and over again - the vendor does not properly set up RAID and gives the companies a system that has no RAID, or RAID 0 or just RAID different than what was expected. Or an OS that is improperly installed. The RAID issue is the most common. Wrote this article, which I've been meaning to write for a while, after talking to someone who discovered after years of running a system with no RAID and their only reason for believing that they might have had some was that they looked at a paper invoice that said that that is was how it was purchased. Had they looked at the RAID controller, they would have known instantly that things were very wrong.
Additional risk is that when things do go wrong, the staff is not familiar with the hardware that they have in production and do not know how to work on it.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Anything involving a screwdriver I'm not interested in and I have no problem getting someone to setup the RAID and install the hypervisor. As for BIOS settings, I wouldn't even know what the settings are supposed to be.
What does setting up a RAID involve a screw driver. Sure I get someone else to do stuff with screwdrivers. Someone else can rack it and any repair would be outsourced but, I'm not sure how raid setup would fall under that.
I'm not sure how IT could properly administer a server if they didn't understand how the underlying hypervisor and server should be configured.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Comparing installing a hypervisor to adjusting the mirrors on a car is quite frankly ridiculous
There are many settings to be tweaked for the "tastes" of each company and environment.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
My time and knowledge is limited and the more I can safely outsource the better. Anything involving a screwdriver I'm not interested in and I have no problem getting someone to setup the RAID and install the hypervisor.
There is a difference between having your IT outsourced (IT department is external) and having a vendor ship gear as a one time setup. In the one case it is still your IT department who are knowledgeable as to the needs of your business, double checking things before systems go into production are correct, etc. Having a factory do the IT work and hope for the best is dangerous in a different way. There is no double check, there is no goal level understanding so they can't tell when things are wrong. And when you need to change the setup and do other things, patch and whatever you need more information and skills than the initial setup.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
What does setting up a RAID involve a screw driver. Sure I get someone else to do stuff with screwdrivers. Someone else can rack it and any repair would be outsourced but, I'm not sure how raid setup would fall under that.
I've seen it go both ways where the "screwdriver guys" get assigned doing the RAID setup. But it is such a critical IT task that it is very hard to believe that anyone would let non-IT people be responsible for storage decisions that even many seasoned IT pros are not very familiar with. Unless you have a stock, repeatable process and good processes for checking up (which mostly means the effort of having someone else do it is wasted) it would seem pretty dangerous.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Comparing installing a hypervisor to adjusting the mirrors on a car is quite frankly ridiculous
The point is that personal customizations that are part of ongoing operations need to be done by the operator, not the factory. To run a server, you need to understand the hypervisor and maintain it. If you drive a car, you need to operate and tweak the mirrors. Both are trivial tasks but ones that need to be done.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Anything involving a screwdriver I'm not interested in ...
I don't know many full time IT people who do bench work. Bench work does not involve critical business decision making and certainly can be outsourced. Replacing a processor on your server or a hard drive is a purely repeatable, scriptable, mechanical operation. It does not even require knowing what a computer is to do well (although that presumably helps.) That's completely different than what we are discussing here. Obviously the vendor will build the server, no one is suggesting that you assemble your own (not that whiteboxing can't be done, it's just not being suggested.) It's the IT tasks of operating the computer that need to be handled by IT (in house or out sourced) rather than manufacturing vendors.
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You mean like getting HP to setup the server and ship it from their factory pre-configured? I don't do that. I buy from a small IT company, HP deliver it direct to my site and the small IT company send someone to rack it up, install any additional components (the screwdriver bit), setup the RAID and install the hypervisor.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
You mean like getting HP to setup the server and ship it from their factory pre-configured?
Correct. HP does not push this as much but you can do it. Dell pushes this hard. They force you to "set it up" on the web GUI when ordering the machine. Tons of people do this and ignore all of this basic setup when they receive the box and just "use it" however it arrives. This often leaves them not just with a lack of knowing how it was set up (as they often seem to come wrong) but also not knowing how to check it, change it or operate it.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't do that. I buy from a small IT company, HP deliver it direct to my site and the small IT company send someone to rack it up, install any additional components (the screwdriver bit), setup the RAID and install the hypervisor.
Why does the person who racks and stacks it (entry level bench work) also do the RAID and hypervisor work (IT?) Doesn't this make the cost of the racker too high? Setting up the OOB I could see just because it's trivial and is what grants the IT team access. But who operates the RAID and hypervisor, handles patching and monitoring and that stuff once the server is in place? Is it that same small company (and you are just paying a premium for rack and stack) or is it another group?
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All my vendors charge the same day rate regardless of who is doing the work or what the work is.
I generally handle everything once the server is in place, but I have a support contract in place for third-line support (ie anything that is beyond my fairly limited knowledge).
Isn't the issue here that Dell set the servers up wrong? Or that someone has failed to check that the RAID config they ordered hadn't actually been setup? These seem like pretty basic mistakes that shouldn't have been allowed to happen. A better thread title might be "Never Let Dell Set Up a Server"
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@Carnival-Boy said:
All my vendors charge the same day rate regardless of who is doing the work or what the work is.
So they charge the same for racking a server as they would to setup exchange do network configs? Seems like they are ripping you off.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Isn't the issue here that Dell set the servers up wrong?
It isn't just dell it's most manufacturers. Its all manual, they look at what you request on the paper and set it up. Lots of mistakes will be made. There's no automated imaging and checking process like there would be for a desktop to check it has the correct version of windows and even the automated process to check that the CTO order was done right. (it's easy to tell a automated process to look for hardware, the custom settings and configs not so much.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
All my vendors charge the same day rate regardless of who is doing the work or what the work is.
So they charge the same for racking a server as they would to setup exchange do network configs? Seems like they are ripping you off.
Or under-charging me for Exchange
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Comparing installing a hypervisor to adjusting the mirrors on a car is quite frankly ridiculous
The point is that personal customizations that are part of ongoing operations need to be done by the operator, not the factory. To run a server, you need to understand the hypervisor and maintain it. If you drive a car, you need to operate and tweak the mirrors. Both are trivial tasks but ones that need to be done.
True, if you're not the one who understands the hypervisor for your company, then the vendor you bring in to install/configure and manage the hypervisor should be the one setting it up as well.
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Ideally I want a vendor that I can trust to set it up right. I don't know of such a vendor. Or rather I don't know of a vendor that I trust, rightly or wrongly. So I end up doing loads myself and getting stressed by long hours and lack of progress
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Ideally I want a vendor that I can trust to set it up right. I don't know of such a vendor. Or rather I don't know of a vendor that I trust, rightly or wrongly. So I end up doing loads myself and getting stressed by long hours and lack of progress
It really sounds like you use vendors to do a lot of the IT work for you. Why not partner with a GOOD MSP?
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I don't know a good MSP.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't know a good MSP.
You might have to find someone who isn't local for that I guess - though non local won't be of much help when it comes to turning screws or mounting servers.
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I'm recruiting at the moment, so that should help. I don't trust outsiders that much. My old boss said I was a control freak, but I think that is slightly unfair.
