OSPF and BMG Usage in Networking
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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.
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@Dashrender said:
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
All of those assumptions DO make it harder for a DC to compete. How many of those apply to people hosting externally facing services, like we are discussing here, though? Somewhere, someone certainly. But very, very rarely.
And even in that circumstance, datacenters can be competitive.
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@Dashrender said:
- DC is trying to make money on the floor rental space
Keep in mind each server only uses a few square inches. They stack 42U high in like eight square feet.
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@Dashrender said:
- 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.
But they are shared equally in both cases. So you just shift where the sharing happens - typically from a low value situation to a high volume one. So the sharing, on average, improves.
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@Dashrender said:
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 UPS cost per server is normally very high in house. You need a lot of batter per machine. A DC has UPS at scale and only needs enough battery to carry the gap between power outage and the generator coming online which is normally under a minute. Generators are cheaper than UPS, so this is a case where you often get more for less, because of the leveraging of the scale.
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@Dashrender said:
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.
The difference is I'm not claiming that they are not spending enough, but that they are spending it poorly. Maybe they need to spend more, often I find they should be spending less.
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I think one thing that affects at least some SMBs that I know is the availability of only one internet provider. Around here if you aren't in the city or suburban area, you may only have one option. If you have a hosted database or storage of some type (not email type services) and you lose internet, you can't access anything until it's up. Email type services are different obviously because if you don't have internet, you can't send emails no matter what, I'm just talking data.
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@johnhooks said:
I think one thing that affects at least some SMBs that I know is the availability of only one internet provider. Around here if you aren't in the city or suburban area, you may only have one option. If you have a hosted database or storage of some type (not email type services) and you lose internet, you can't access anything until it's up. Email type services are different obviously because if you don't have internet, you can't send emails no matter what, I'm just talking data.
Remember the discussion here, though, is about hosting externally facing applications, not ones used in house. So the lack of redundant ISPs would basically guarantee that hosted in a datacenter is the only rational option for those companies rather than making it less likely.
