@Dashrender said:

Something to keep in mind. While every business wants as little downtime as possible and as little data lose as possible, while they may start with that goal, and give the times listed above, once you provide them numbers that provide that level of service, they may come back and change their minds and lower these requirements (i.e. make them longer).

Maybe with down time, but not so much loss of data, especially if you are a publicly traded company where you can not lose any data and have required data retention periods.

@DustinB3403 said:

@Dashrender I am doing everything in my power to avoid Spinning Rust. The original proposal I made includes SSDs in RAID 5, 8TB in total.

Have you run something like a Dell Dpack to actually see how many IOPS you are using to know if you really will see any benefit from SSDs?

@DustinB3403 said:

I bought a full height 4 post off of craigslist in mint condition for $40 bucks.

Shelf's and trays $10 and $5 respectively per what I wanted.

lucky.. this is all localy https://roanoke.craigslist.org/sys/5234999886.html been reposting it for at least 1yr too big for me. really looking for it to be encloused too.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Draco8573 said:

but the reason i am in college was because I was going to go for mechanical engineering but that didn't work out.

I started in engineering too. Manufacturing Systems (basically Industrial Eng but with a specific focus on big manufacturing) for me, not mechanical. I dropped out after two years, best decision ever. I have had such a wildly better career than my classmates, most of whom went on to Masters and PhD degrees. Their careers are much shorter than mine with much lower earnings and flexibility.

I was an electrical engineering student for a while. Still love it but, heck I get paid a lot more than an EE would.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Draco8573 said:

...but I heard of a beowulf cluster and it sounds fun to try.

Wow, the 1990s coming back again? Have not heard of one of those in forever!

Never heard it called beowulf before.. I guess college is teaching the old terms haha.

@Dashrender said:

I completely agree that it proves nothing, but disagree that it's a SMB way of thinking.
Most HR departments put this requirement on their job postings. The HR filters the incoming resumes by those requirements before sending them onto a hiring manager.

Now maybe you have a better system, and you get ALL the resumes directly, but if a company has a real legit HR department, that's unlikely. I say this from my own experience, which is small and limited, so it's biased by my own experience.

That's not true. Only in small companies does HR get involved (in the way of) the hiring process. HR's job is not to select the candidate it's to help the Hiring manager with what they are looking for. Sure they scan for potential legal issues but they don't add degrees. I've seen that in SMBs but, we are a fortune 500 and do not run that way. HR only helps the hiring manager get what they want, the hiring manager has the ultimate say.

@Dashrender said:

if they have a degree in IT that it would show that at least know something

That shows nothing, and is an SMB way of thinking. We tend to hire people without degrees or only associates degrees/vocational. Our Director of IT has Masters degrees for business management and business information systems.

What's the best degree for IT? Business management!

@JayRMS said:

What's the max depth you need? I can definitely find you a couple options under $700. Sound like you don't need an enclosure, but just a 4 post option at 24u? Is that accurate or do you have any other specifics?

Not sure What's the min dell rail mount like 24-29 inches I can't remember off the top of my head. enclosure is preferred.

This is the cheapest I can find: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Norco-C-24U-24U-Rack-Cabinet-/301380755883?hash=item462bb161ab:g:L3oAAOxy9tpSA-Tg

@gjacobse said:

At some point, when I actually HAVE a server or two.. I plan to build this with some minor alterations:

DIY Server Rack

Wonder how much that would cost, I might go to lowes tonight and see.

I can use any phone, I'm on an iPhone 6 right now because it just works. The only things I do on a phone are:

Email (Work Exchange, Personal Exchange and Gmail)
SMS sometimes
Pandora
Call

@scottalanmiller said:

Hedgefund I was at was 1:3 with security teams not groups with IT and shadow IT not counted.

Yeah and many of those have had to be bailed out by the government. The financial and banking industries aren't realistic examples to compare to normal fortune 500's.

@Dashrender said:

Why are you counting developers? I could have sworn that @scottalanmiller had an article that discussed how they really aren't IT. Even if that is wrong, they probably aren't part of the normal troubleshooting group for support of the system as a whole, or are they?

They support the applications they develop, and troubleshoot issues with that so they are. They technicians just give the tickets straight to them same as the server ones come to me.

@gjacobse said:

Each case is different.. depending on the issue I think they had an SLA of an hour. They pushed about 500 vehicles off the line a shift. So being down was a big deal, they didn't idle the line for much.

We push a lot of manufacturing in one hour, but for the most part it's just manual labor so that part doesn't affect us too much at any of our locations. It's mostly engineering and sales that need things done quick.

@gjacobse said:

18 people at once, though it was rare to have that many people.

I'm not exactly sure how much our technicians get, of course unless it's an emergency they aren't suppose to call IT they are suppose to put in tickets and we tell them that. Our SLA is 8 business hours.

@Dashrender said:

100 workstation environment, machines have either Windows 7 Pro or 8.1 Pro licenses

Only 100 workstations shouldn't be too hard to do manually, which you'll need to do to get the key.

We have 1 volume license of it just to do imaging, and then will do inplace upgrades on the machines to get it registered for windows 10 then do images via WDS. But this process will take us a while with 20k computers.

Doesn't seem that useful to me.

How big is your IT department. I had a vendor telling me today we don't run very lean and are over staffed in IT. We have a ratio about 1:1,000 (1 IT staff for every 1,000 users). That's counting all developers, technicians, and Systems engineers as myself as well as our director of IT.

I don't want complexity just for the sake of complexity but, I don't avoid complexity when it's a better solution.

@shybrsky said:

few week ago just fine ...

I thought you said it was fine two days ago. Sometimes using Fiddler can help you find out what's going on with traffic to a proxy server (though I usually use it for blocked stuff) I'm not sure if it will give you any clues in this case or not: http://www.telerik.com/fiddler