Posts made by NerdyDad

How about Best Practices? Common IT mistakes/disasters and how to avoid them. More generalized to IT and not to a certain industry.

Okay, maybe instead of a vendor page, just vendor.product tags. I could go into ML, search for a vendor or a product, and see if anybody else has posted a review on that product, whether good or bad.

One thing that I don't like about other review systems is the ability of anonymity or fake profiles. Only under certain circumstances could I understand anonymity, and that is really under whistleblowing circumstances. Don't get me wrong. I think we need anonymity on the Internet, but that is a whole nother topic.

That totally make sense and I'm good with those answers. Unless we're all taking the painstaking task of monitor reviews, it would be totally impractical for just one person to vet reviews day in and day out.

Would it be possible to add vendor pages that IT Pros can give unbiased and frank reviews of vendors and their products? Something that the vendor could not persuade a pros opinion on, but something that ML would maintain? Would that be of interest to anybody? Not a place for rants but of honest opinions.

I've been using Brave for a while now and it has really come along over the past year or so. I still use chrome for somethings, but Brave has started to become my main driver. Blocks ad built in. From what I can tell, Brave is seen as chrome around the interwebs.

So, we've been looking at new SAN technologies for a while now and have some bids in place. We have an idea of who we want to go with. We haven't purchased or announced it yet to anybody. Just talked about it internally. However, the other vendors that have submitted bids are inviting us to special events such as sports events or movie screenings.

This is more of a moral question then technical one but thought this would be the perfect place to ask such a question. I'm sure that the invitation to the event is only extended because we have talked with them about their product and have expressed interest. If you knew that you probably aren't going to go with a vendor that is sponsoring an exclusive event, would you go to said event?

@dafyre Typically yes, but the storage consultant advised that we not connect the storage to the house network as it posses a security issue. My thought process is that if they are already within the network then they are going to get to the data, then they are going to get through to the virtual environment anyways. If they are already in your network, then they are probably using either an admin account or a service account. Either way, they're getting in.

@scottalanmiller One of those was a technician mistake by neglecting the alerts of the SAN. As said before, the SAN was throwing errors of disk failures. 2 disks had already failed and was trying to rebuild off of spares that it had. During this rebuild, 2 other disks were also wanting to fail but the SAN controllers were not allowing for it to fail.

I'm trying to start better practices in myself by checking in on these systems on a daily basis to make sure there are no actions that would need to be taken before alerts leads to issues.

We're only a 4-man team covering these 3 locations. IT Manager (Boss), SysAdmin (Me), 2 other guys in helpdesk. Not trying to promote laziness or anything, but I also can't monitor systems 24/7 or I'll find myself divorced and crazy real quick. I suppose there is a way to have a system monitor other systems and alert me if certain conditions arise? I assume off of such things such as SNMPv3 or something? Any recommendations?

Also, the SAN in question has bee retired. We have 2 others in our datacenter that has their data pulled from them and the SANs in question have been taken offline. I'll go and pull them out of the datacenter tomorrow.

An update and closing to this problem. I also posted about this on SW as well. My RAID6 was on the verge of failing. I had 2 disks die on me, got them swapped, and the SAN was attempting to rebuilt both of them at the same time while a 3rd and 4th disk was wanting to die as well. During the rewrites to the drives, the SAN would hit a bad sector and fail the rewrite, causing the SAN to go offline and taking the vm down with it. We eventually had to take the last pulled drive to a data restoration place with a spare and they were able to get the data off of one drive and onto another overnight. That cost us about $2,400, but when you're talking about millions of dollars of orders a week, $2.4k is a drop in the bucket.

I did call Dell support and they were kind enough to remote in and assess the situation, even escalating it to a Storage Engineer. The SE got in and was able to tell me what was going on. My firmware was 2nd from the latest version, both cards were working well, but was about to lose the RAID6 array.

Lessons learned:

1. Make sure and double check that you have backups to business critical servers. Test them. Especially if you have the spare hardware doing nothing. If you have the hardware and are not testing your backups, you are doing yourself a serious injustice. Please refer back to Veeam's 3-2-1 rule when it comes to backup strategizing.
2. Keep an eye on your SANs and keep them happy. Replace disks when needed and keep the firmware up to date. Replace your disks and have spares on the shelf.
3. Management (if you are listening): Put your IT department on a 5-7 year refresh cycle. All machines are man-made. Man is fallible. Therefore, so are the machines that they make. Machines are going to fail eventually. Make sure that you have an architecture that is fault tolerant and able to be replaced on a 5-7 year cycle. Plus, keep a maintenance agreement with each of these manufacturers as long as you are on the equipment.
4. Assess your design architecture. Are you currently using the Inverted Pyramid of Doom (IPOD)? If so, and management allows, get off of it. Go to Hyperconvergence. At your main data location, make sure that you have at least 3 nodes. 2 for load balancing and 1 for failover. At each of your additional sites, put in at least 2 nodes, 1 for production and 1 for a backup. Still keep to the 5-7 year refresh cycle.

My management has decided not to check out hyperconvergence, but are sticking with the IPOD scheme for now. We are going to be reutilizing one of our EQL's for replication of data from the Compellent SAN. However, I want to note in one of @scottalanmiller's videos that added complexity does not increase resiliency in the network, but adds more of Moore's Law saying that if it can fail, it will fail.

We currently have Directv aka AT&TV and we're considering going from Sprint to AT&T to bundle and possibly get some savings. Does anybody else do this? Has anybody else seen the savings in it?

@Dashrender That's the problem we're starting to face now. Our last mid-election cycle contract is up and they like to tack on extra charges when you're out of contract. Plus, you can't tell me that a phone truly costs $600-1000 to make + profit. There's got to be profit built in for both the manufacturer and the carrier. I'm sure the manufacturer and the carrier likes to negotiate. Otherwise, the carrier isn't going to carry your phone for free.

Hey, thank everybody. Long time member of SW and was introduced to ML. So, I'm checking it out as another resource.

Sprint

We have the unlimited plan and 1500 minutes with 4 phones for about $250/month. They like to try to stick it to you in the maintenance and purchasing of the phone. Don't really travel that much outside of the US, but I've had problems in New Mexico a couple of years ago with coverage.

Its on my calendar.

@Aconboy @scottalanmiller Looks like I would need 2 of 1150's all decked out in order to handle the processing power for the datacenter.

@scottalanmiller not yet as we have a 10 Mbps MPLS circuit between locations with AT&T. That's another SPF as well, but we're dealing with that by looking at Time Warner Cable and using our Cisco firewalls to load balance between the 2.

@scottalanmiller That is a good point. I'm almost to the point of questioning everything. Such as what is the meaning of life?, but that's another discussion for another day.

@wrx7m We have a couple of Synology's around our enterprise and am currently using Veeam to backup VMs from their respective local hosts. But I would also have the same concern about the synology that I am also having with this current SAN. It will eventually be the bottom part of the pyramid.