OSPF and BMG Usage in Networking
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Honestly, something they just probably never considered. They always did it in house, why move it out - but today we know why, but it still takes someone thinking of it before you even have the conversation.
Using a datacenter for hosting has been a standard since the 1990s and the idea that you never run critical apps in house since the early 2000s. It's a long time to have avoided conversations and not thought about best practices. At some point "status quo" in an organization isn't a good excuse because you can't have had the same people in place all that time without outside experience or exposure.
These are the Scott standards since those time frames. Perhaps even then large corporation standards, but definitely not the standard seen in use/practice at the SMB level. While I barely consider email critical (I know others do) there are still tons of SMBs that run it in house and only now are looking at things like Rackspace and O365.
I may have been considered a best practice to move everything to a datacenter since the 1990's (I missed that memo though), but as we know, the filtering of information is sometimes, perhaps even often, slow to be passed along, let alone adopted.
You have the benefit of being extremely logically minded and self motivated to do the best thing possible, most businesses, as we can see from many examples in SW, do not. As such, you discovered long ago that you could save money by hosting your infrastructure in a DC versus handling it onsite - taking into account everything from bandwidth, power, heating/cooling, environmental controls.
And while I do believe all of that to be true from your numbers, It's still going to cost a company more money than self hosting. If I'm in a DC that means I need two ISP connections (the one in the DC - which probably comes with my rental space) and my ownsite - no doubling up there = more spending.
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@Dashrender said:
These are the Scott standards since those time frames. Perhaps even then large corporation standards, but definitely not the standard seen in use/practice at the SMB level. While I barely consider email critical (I know others do) there are still tons of SMBs that run it in house and only now are looking at things like Rackspace and O365.
These are things taught in the industry. If you have to resort to calling things "Scott standards" you should probably stop and think if you aren't looking for excuses. I was taught this stuff as very basic IT in the late 1990s. Ever since Spiceworks began people have been talking about this. In no way is this a "Scott thing." That SMBs do IT poorly doesn't imply that standards and best practices, common sense or good ideas aren't known - only that people are lazy, don't care or get "weird" and think that they know better than the industry.
That lots of SMBs do it actually tells us that likely it is true as we know that SMBs very often do very poor IT decision making both on the technology and on the business side. This doesn't mean that it is wrong in absolutely every case, but we expect that anything that is a well known best practice will broadly not be followed in the SMB for a very, very long time, if ever. So that it is seen there tells us in no way that the people working there didn't know better or that the best practice didn't exist.
Using "SMBs do bad things" as an excuse for SMBs to keep doing bad things is partially why they do it - it's become socially acceptable in technology circles to excuse bad decisions because a company is an SMB.
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@Dashrender said:
I may have been considered a best practice to move everything to a datacenter since the 1990's (I missed that memo though), but as we know, the filtering of information is sometimes, perhaps even often, slow to be passed along, let alone adopted.
Exactly. That they didn't care to follow best practices, pay attention, listen or whatever doesn't suggest that they didn't know or they practices didn't exist.
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@Dashrender said:
And while I do believe all of that to be true from your numbers, It's still going to cost a company more money than self hosting.
So you believe and don't believe at the same time? Why will it cost more? I know companies that have saved money doing it.
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@Dashrender said:
If I'm in a DC that means I need two ISP connections (the one in the DC - which probably comes with my rental space) and my ownsite - no doubling up there = more spending.
This isn't a logical point. Yes, "you" need more connections. That's like saying that every website you use requires you to have a connection for their server to the Internet. Yes, technically it does. Does using a website = more spending? No. So this doesn't either. You've taken a fact (that the servers need a network connection) and made a disconnected assumption that this will make it more costly. This simply isn't a direct correlation.
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@scottalanmiller said:
These are things taught in the industry.
Bullshit.
I was never taught these things.
I have been doing this truly profesisonally since graduating from ITT (waste of money) in 1993.
Never in any of my cert courses or anything else was I ever "Trained" in these things you claim.
I went back for a full degree in 2005, eventually getting a my Master's degree.
None of this was ever taught.This is a reality in your world. Not the entire world.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
These are things taught in the industry.
Bullshit.
I was never taught these things.
I have been doing this truly profesisonally since graduating from ITT (waste of money) in 1993.
Never in any of my cert courses or anything else was I ever "Trained" in these things you claim.
I went back for a full degree in 2005, eventually getting a my Master's degree.
None of this was ever taught.This is a reality in your world. Not the entire world.
Likewise, you are taking your own experience and claiming that no one knows things because you don't know them. You aren't the end all of knowledge and experience.
I'm sorry that your degrees and such missed stuff like this, but that's something we talk about all the time how that education process causes people to miss things, especially the basics.
CompTIA has made this part of their entry level cert process in 2000. Microsoft was teaching it before then. College rarely teaches IT as a practice or best practices or even hires people that work in IT to do so, so I'm not sure why that's even mentioned.
Just because you've missed things that the industry has been discussing doesn't mean that it isn't there. I'm taking the position that I have no special exposure, and I did not, and that the general learning processes which I did, which were less than you, covered this as obvious, basic and standard.
And since then, that has been supported by years of discussions in the industry. Not that everyone follows best practices, but almost no one disputes what they are or that they exist.
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I'll admit, assuming that my experience isn't special holds people to a fairly high bar, in theory. But the alternative is worse, right?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Likewise, you are taking your own experience and claiming that no one knows things because you don't know them. You aren't the end all of knowledge and experience.
I am not claiming that no one knows. Then again, I am not claiming everyone knows either. You are.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I may have been considered a best practice to move everything to a datacenter since the 1990's (I missed that memo though), but as we know, the filtering of information is sometimes, perhaps even often, slow to be passed along, let alone adopted.
Exactly. That they didn't care to follow best practices, pay attention, listen or whatever doesn't suggest that they didn't know or they practices didn't exist.
I didn't know. I didn't learn this until the mid 2000's.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I may have been considered a best practice to move everything to a datacenter since the 1990's (I missed that memo though), but as we know, the filtering of information is sometimes, perhaps even often, slow to be passed along, let alone adopted.
Exactly. That they didn't care to follow best practices, pay attention, listen or whatever doesn't suggest that they didn't know or they practices didn't exist.
I didn't know. I didn't learn this until the mid 2000's.
That's still a full decade ago, right? About the amount of time that I stated originally. Maybe a small amount less, but not much. And were you an IT decision maker by that time?
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To make these claims as standards, at least to me, means that the average IT person would have this knowledge, and hopefully be applying it. I say that this is not the case. That the average IT person didn't know this, and therefore wasn't following it.
You'd an admitted mega reader - this alone puts you outside the norm. I'd be willing to wage that the average IT person reads one maybe two IT books a year at best, more likely they are keeping up only on the IT things that personally interest them.
Where were you working when you learned that critical services should be moved to a DC and not locally hosted? what were the circumstances of that learning?
I'm asking because I feel that they will be unusual circumstances compared to the experiences of most IT, especially SMB IT personal.
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@Dashrender said:
To make these claims as standards, at least to me, means that the average IT person would have this knowledge, and hopefully be applying it. I say that this is not the case. That the average IT person didn't know this, and therefore wasn't following it.
This is where I don't agree. Maybe not the average IT person if you include help desk and other non-decision making roles that aren't associated with this kind of decision. If you use that inclusion then I would agree that there isn't a single thing in IT that is "standard knowledge."
But for people tasked with this kind of decision making, I am saying that it was extremely common knowledge by then. Maybe not every single person knew it, but average I'm quite confident did. Applying it, mostly, but not as commonly as know it.
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@Dashrender said:
Where were you working when you learned that critical services should be moved to a DC and not locally hosted? what were the circumstances of that learning?
Likely at a hotel doing the overnight desk shifts while working to get back into IT. I did most of my learning then when there was time before getting into IT (after coming out of software engineering.) I had a few years where I was managing restaurants and auditing hotels while switching career modes. That was the late 1990s. Definitely by 1999 I was talking to hospitals about the need to be in a datacenter for critical workloads, I remember the conversation (and the hospital losing their data during the meeting, which was awesome.)
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@Dashrender said:
I'm asking because I feel that they will be unusual circumstances compared to the experiences of most IT, especially SMB IT personal.
Unusual I don't think. I think most people had time where they learned about IT before working in the field. Not all, clearly some jump straight in without knowing anything about IT and just get into helpdesk and start "doing" (my cousin is doing this right now, did some bench work and got a call center job) but generally I think people get a cert or a few, study some things so that they go into IT knowing a bit of what they are doing.
I learned this during those years.
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It was during that time that I did my MCSE+I and most of my CompTIA certs, for example. The entry level certs that helped to get me into the field. Coming from software engineering, back then, did diddly for getting you work in IT, even with a Solaris administration background!
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
And while I do believe all of that to be true from your numbers, It's still going to cost a company more money than self hosting.
So you believe and don't believe at the same time? Why will it cost more? I know companies that have saved money doing it.
So there are two parts here.
The simple hosting of the server in the DC with power/HVAC/etc would probably be less. But only when comparing a sorta like (it's nearly impossible to get the same levels in house as it is in a DC) setup in house, which nearly no one does or tries to do.
Of course I write all of this and recall a word you used - critical. You said
Using a datacenter for hosting has been a standard since the 1990s and the idea that you never run critical apps in house since the early 2000s.
So with that in mind, my associate left employ of that company about 7 years ago, so I guess he got out just about the time this would have been filtering down to his level.
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@Dashrender said:
So with that in mind, my associate left employ of that company about 7 years ago, so I guess he got out just about the time this would have been filtering down to his level.
Seven years ago was 2008. He was a decision maker around hosting but wasn't aware of the benefits of data centers?
I was not a decision maker, just an entry level guy looking for a junior position, almost exactly a decade earlier and got this training from one source or another. Maybe I was unique, but that's a full generation or more in IT terms and different levels.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
So you believe and don't believe at the same time? Why will it cost more? I know companies that have saved money doing it.
So there are two parts here.
The simple hosting of the server in the DC with power/HVAC/etc would probably be less. But only when comparing a sorta like (it's nearly impossible to get the same levels in house as it is in a DC) setup in house, which nearly no one does or tries to do.
That's a big assumption. Why would it not be at least possible that having high end datacenter services is cheaper than doing it poorly in house? It is cheap for Ford to build me a car compared to me building my own, even though they will do a far better job. Sometimes scale and expertise is cheaper.
Also, you don't have to compare enterprise DC to casual in house. You can compare lower end DC in that case. Might not be apples to apples but will be closer. Not all DCs are the same and if you are happy to cut corners in house, you can cut them in a DC too.
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@scottalanmiller said:
That's a big assumption. Why would it not be at least possible that having high end datacenter services is cheaper than doing it poorly in house? It is cheap for Ford to build me a car compared to me building my own, even though they will do a far better job. Sometimes scale and expertise is cheaper.
Also, you don't have to compare enterprise DC to casual in house. You can compare lower end DC in that case. Might not be apples to apples but will be closer. Not all DCs are the same and if you are happy to cut corners in house, you can cut them in a DC too.
It's truly inconceivable to me that that it would be possible to host a server in a DC less than you can in house. Of course this makes a few assumptions.
- in-house I don't pay a fee for the server location
- I don't need specialized heating/cooling
- Not concerned with redundant ISP links
- Not concerned with generator backup power
etc
Things that make it more expensive
- DC is trying to make money on the floor rental space
- no shared services, mainly, the ISP used for an in-house server can be shared with the rest of the business, but the same goes for HVAC.
Hosting a server onsite where I'm mainly ensuring I have a UPS that lasts long enough to shut the server down in case of a power outage is pretty darned cheap.
The issue here is spending - many SMBs just won't spend what is really needed to provide best practices. There is no defense for that. You're right - I guess I was making excuses (though I wasn't trying to), but that's what it really boils down to. Most SMBs are willing to gamble their businesses and spend less than they should to protect their IT infrastructure.
