@nerdydad said in Redundant Network Connections:

We do have dual-wan connections, but we're also connecting 3 locations together. If we only had one connection connecting all 3 locations together, and one connection died, then that location (more than likely to be a plant) will be spending the day without any productivity because they wouldn't have access to the resources that they need. We're talking 250 people working at any one time at at least $11/hr.
11x250=$2750/hr (along with the added value they make to the company) versus $100-600/month for the extra WAN connection. It only makes sense for us to have the availability here to keep people working.

The City (another job I had) had every offsite pointing via Dish to Cityhall just to get internet. Some were 3-4 jumps. Single point of failure for the entire City. Every electrical storm took our 25% of our dishes.

@coliver said in Asus and HP Announce First Windows 10 ARM Laptops:

Wasn't the original surface an arm tablet?

Yeah

@scottalanmiller I think she's so used to me putting her into hypothetical situations she has adapted to saying what she needs to say without arguing lol

0_1490665936979_In_This_Corner_We_Have_Dave.jpg

@Dashrender said in Replacing the Dead IPOD, SAN Bit the Dust:

@scottalanmiller said in Replacing the Dead IPOD, SAN Bit the Dust:

Also the needs of a SAN are different than the needs of a LAN. So you likely want different switches. I'd love Netgear Prosafe unmanaged on my SAN but would generally prefer Ubiquiti EdgeSwitches on my LAN.

Any opinion on Unifi Switches yet?

We use one in the lab and it's been great, but we aren't pushing its limits or anything.

@StuartJordan said in Scott Alan Miller: SMB System Architectural Patterns:

I watched your Storage 101 video, that was very good Scott.

Thanks 🙂

@Jimmy9008 keep in mind that resulting availability and risk aren't the same thing. Any five nines system is expected to hit six nines nine out of ten years. It's the average over the operating lifespan, not over a set interval. Otherwise any normal interval that you select would have 100% uptime.

So there are two ways to look at it reasonably...

The first is what an individual system actually provides. The second is the average of all systems configured identically, over all of their operational lifetimes.

The first you measure. The second you project with simulations.

In extremely large systems, like BackBlaze, they get close approximations to the later through measurement because they look only at small components (like hard drives) of which they have substantiation numbers to create a reasonable approximation to a full number.

When I was on Wall St., we had 80,000 servers in our pool and so we had actual risk and availability numbers for the industry in datacenters like ours. But it still only told us about a handful of server models, and only under our exact conditions. And it still took a decade or more to produce meaningful numbers, and those numbers only applied to the servers of the past, not the ones being installed new.

Adding in @HPEStorageGuy as we were discussing this exact topic a few minute ago on SW in another thread.

@scottalanmiller said in How to Market RAID 6 When Customers Need Safety:

@DustinB3403 said in How to Market RAID 6 When Customers Need Safety:

@BBigford said in How to Market RAID 6 When Customers Need Safety:

I once asked a vendor who were pitching an appliance that supported RAID0+1 and RAID1+0, "what would you recommend between the two, to a potential customer?" They said it didn't matter as they are both the same thing.

We didn't go with that vendor.

RAID10 vs RAID0+1

Or, you know...

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2014/07/comparing-raid-10-and-raid-01/

TL:DR pictures are prettier 😛

@DustinB3403 said in A Public Post Mortem of An Outage:

Wow, that is a rather long time.

Yup, parts were very hard to get and getting the server physically moved before diagnostics could begin ate huge amounts of time up. Cost of speeding things up would have been huge - replacing gear instead of repairing it. But since the vendor could not diagnose the issue with the hardware (their error messages were ones that they did not have documented) it complicated things greatly.

@Dashrender said:

Most storage devices in this range also lack the support options that enterprise servers do.

This sentence is the third italicized block of text seems odd.

Fixed, thanks.

thanks, fixed.

I forgot about this topic and found it mentioned in a conversation. This thread was a great resource that never got linked anywhere useful. Now to figure out how to make it more referenceable.

@hobbit666 said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

Might be suggesting a 3rd party review of the solution so look out for an E-mail NTG 😄

@Minion-Queen waits with baited breath.

This whole topic is now starting to sound like "A house is a house for me" lol.

Just realized that this topic actually was missing the tags! Ugh, no wonder if rarely comes up in searches. Fixed, finally.

@scottalanmiller said:

This means that resilvers expected to fail when we look at the math model that only gives has an average (mean) failure rate we get successful resilver after success resilver. This also means that array expansion operations (replacing one drive at a time with a larger drive) would also be far more likely to be successful than expected based solely on the math averages.

And that's how my boss got away with it heheh (well so far)