Trying to find an optimal solution for a client with various problems!
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@Ambarishrh said:
they have to wait for someone to come in and replace
Sure. But how long does that take? How much can they be losing during that down time? If they can't afford a hard drive, they CAN afford downtime. You can't have budget issues and have downtime be expensive. The two are mutually exclusive.
That's the handy thing about companies that can't afford to "do things right", they can always afford to be down for a long time.
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@Ambarishrh said:
I am not sure how things work with the companies there, but I myself in my company works with our CFO and CEO on IT budgets. The main goal is to keep the expenses minimal to make sure the data is protected and available.
Sure, make a budget. But the CEO and CFO would have to be blithering idiots to see an opportunity to make more money, save money or protect money and refuse to do it because they are locked into an artificial budget that they made. Budgets are just for them to do planning, there is nothing rigid about them if they don't make it so.
I'm sure they are not so lacking in intelligence to intentionally throw money away just to stick to their own budget that they made for themselves.
Budgets don't help you save money, they have you plan spending.
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@Ambarishrh said:
Now to achieve this, it can be done the expensive way, the cheap way or a moderate way. And its always the cheap and best way that the management wants, so they can push the rest of the money on something else.
That doesn't appear to be what they are doing though, is it? They are willing to do things that don't work and spend a lot of money on it. They are not being cheap nor are they getting lots of feature. They appear to be the opposite. They are only doing things the expensive way, but only in a way that doesn't work, right? They know that they have overspent AND that they are not meeting their needs yet are not adjusting how they work?
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@Ambarishrh said:
Our role is to make sure that to play within that budget and get data safe and give higher availability
No, IT's job is not about playing in a budget. It's about advising the business people what to do. If we advise well, the management would have to be idiots to stick to a budget that was hurting the company. In many cases, good management won't even have a budget, because budgets encourage wasting money while not meeting goals.
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@Ambarishrh said:
I am sure a lot of companies have such budgeting, when it comes to IT.
Thankfully no, many use IT to push the business forward. Budgets fundamentally undermine that. Sadly many businesses don't understand financial systems and do budgets anyway to attempt to make things easier for the financial people to the detriment of the company.
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Things like QB and there is another painful system they have used for their internal operation, which i can see that their employees has to manually go to each machine to update the software, these are their past mistakes and now they cant afford to have the time to get an alternate solution,and get their employees to learn the new system. So there are things which i can't change.
So whats done is done, and they had invested money in quite a lot of things wrongly which now cant be changed at least not in the near future. This is the answer i got when i asked for looking at better alternatives to change these systems to an efficient one.
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@Ambarishrh said:
A business person looking at value on IT is very rare as far as I've seen unless that guy himself is techie and knows about the value and usage of IT.
I know of no successful or serious company that does not do this. Small or large, healthy companies don't think of any department (IT, HR, legal, finance, operations, etc.) as an enemy or useless. Why would they have them at all if that were the case? Sure, many tiny companies going nowhere and destined to fail have this opinion, but I never see one actually make money or last for long.
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@Ambarishrh said:
So whats done is done, and they had invested money in quite a lot of things wrongly which now cant be changed at least not in the near future. This is the answer i got when i asked for looking at better alternatives to change these systems to an efficient one.
But.... you are talking about making huge investments into technical debt, right? Spending many times that they have already spent to create more mess? How much money are they now willing to throw after systems that they know have failed? This is called throwing good money after bad. If they have any concern for money, they have to stop doing this. It sounds like they are using money as an excuse, but their actions state that they have more than enough, they just refuse to use it wisely for some reason.
They need to bear the cost of moving off of QB at some point, the sooner they do it the less that they spend. Spending tons of money to protect QB is going to add up quickly.
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Let's take a quick look at some costs:
- Second Windows license: $750
- Second Desktop: $800
- Drobo B800i: $2,000
That's $3,500 just right there, not including any cost from you to do all of this work. That is so much more money that just putting in an entry level server which will likely protect them far more. I'd rather spend $1,500 to do things right and have serious protection than $3,500 to do things poorly and possibly make things worse.
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Do you see now why I feel that they have no concern for the cost? There are well established patterns for how to do IT well for a reason - because you can't work around them and do something cheaper. If you don't follow good IT practices, you start overspending like crazy in nearly all cases.
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Take the case of the company where i work. Out of the past 7 years that ive worked with them, 5 years IT was run with little or no additional budget. Break the system, then you get something new. There was an investment in the beginning when the company started and thats it. No improvements on infrastructure, new services etc. We used to run file servers with FTP between offices, even thought there were better solutions which will really help them to improve IT performance, thus improving overall employee productivity. Instead they invested that on the business, within 5 years became the top in that industry, sold out to a very large company. So they became successful with this format.
Only after the company acquired by a bigger group, we started having devices like netapp, more servers etc, where as it was run previously with multiple LACIE drives, just to give you an example.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Do you see now why I feel that they have no concern for the cost? There are well established patterns for how to do IT well for a reason - because you can't work around them and do something cheaper. If you don't follow good IT practices, you start overspending like crazy in nearly all cases.
I get the picture, with the new costs that they could have, they can get a good server and spend less get more value out of it
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@Ambarishrh said:
Instead they invested that on the business, within 5 years became the top in that industry....
This is a mistake in thinking. All investment in IT is an investment in the business. Had they business skills they could have gotten loans to invest in both, if anyone had faith in their business skills (and the numbers been real.)
Good IT should rarely cost a lot of money. Maybe people were recommending overspending. Good IT often costs far less than people think, which is why budgets are dangerous. Once you have a budget, IT is incentivized to waste money to meet budget, even when there isn't strong value to what they are spending.
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@Ambarishrh said:
I get the picture, with the new costs that they could have, they can get a good server and spend less get more value out of it
Right. They can either spend a ton and keep going down a bad path, or they can start fixing things and saving money at the same time!
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so to do this right, get an entry level server ( a real one! :)) with RAID and setup AD on that, may be make the current one as secondary AD. Dont want to throw that out if possible
Does it sound right? -
@Ambarishrh said:
so to do this right, get an entry level server ( a real one! :)) with RAID and setup AD on that, may be make the current one as secondary AD. Dont want to throw that out if possible
Does it sound right?Right, that sounds SO much more reasonable. All they need is an entry level server with RAID 1, nothing special, nothing I wouldn't use at home. And that is only if AD and Windows is needed. Maybe even that is overkill. But assuming that it is... then yes.
Things that should never be overlooked, if they are stop and rethink because something is wrong:
- Real servers should be used for data (Supermicro, refurb, etc. This isn't expensive.)
- RAID should always be used (or something "more" like RAIN.)
- Backups must be taken.
- Virtualize
Those four, essentially, should never be questioned. You can't save money skipping any of them. So if someone wants to skip them, something is fundamentally wrong. There might be some extreme edge case where it would come up, but assume that even if such a rare edge case exists, it will never happen to you. Those four should be unquestioned. If any one of the four is questioned, chances are you can't have a server at all and need to rethink completely.
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Places where you might save some or even a lot of money here:
- Remove QB, go to something free. No serious business should be on a toy like QB. There are far better free options and paid ones too. Wave is completely free, for example, and much bigger than QB.
- AD. Is that needed? Maybe, maybe not.
- Why is Windows being used for file sharing? It's good for that, but not cheap and not good for HA file sharing like you want.
- Is Windows needed at all?
- Is a server needed at all? Can you go down to a tiny NAS?
From the description, it sounds like a few hundred dollars on an appropriate two bay NAS with two not very expensive WD Red drives would do the trick, potentially.
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So IF you go with a new, second server....
Keep the old one, put on HyperV or XenServer and have the second DC there. However, running a second server will cost $700+ in licensing, so that is a pretty major investment just to have a second AD DC. That's not a very common need and, like so many things, if the company even hints at IT budgets being an issue, secondary AD DCs is a place where you should not be spending a lot of money (or any.)
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@scottalanmiller said:
Places where you might save some or even a lot of money here:
- Remove QB, go to something free. No serious business should be on a toy like QB. There are far better free options and paid ones too. Wave is completely free, for example, and much bigger than QB.
As mentioned in my original post, the internet connection is not very reliable at the moment with the single ISP they have in that place. I would love to recommend solutions like wave, where they get web based access from any where not just their office, not having the issues what they have now, but i am sure there are other better free softwares that can easily replace QB, but that needs time, a good amount of time for their finance person to evaluate, understand and implement in their company.
- AD. Is that needed? Maybe, maybe not.
Debatable, we can even get Zentyal instead of AD reducing the server OS cost, without compromising the basic AD joiniing/managing machines from central server.
- Why is Windows being used for file sharing? It's good for that, but not cheap and not good for HA file sharing like you want.
- Is Windows needed at all?
- Is a server needed at all? Can you go down to a tiny NAS?
A NAS again, becomes a single point of failure, considering the power issues they have. The first question i asked them is "when are they planning to move, which seems like only next year mid"
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@Ambarishrh said:
A NAS again, becomes a single point of failure, considering the power issues they have.
You need to stop thinking in these terms. This is not good business or cost thinking. You need to think in terms of "reliability for the money." Single points of failure are a term we use to incite panic, and they are useful to think about, but what you care about are cost and reliability (the two things that they were not thinking about that got them to where they are.)
The power issue is not solved by removing single points of failure, nor is heat, nor is flood or fire. The problem that you had before was not from any of those things either. Any decent NAS would have protected you AND saved a lot of money already.
And if a NAS is still a problem being much better than where you are today, you can make a NAS redundant much more inexpensively than a Windows server too.
