@DustinB3403 said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@Veet said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
This is my quote from the original challenge: "We all (I hope by now) know that SANs have their place and a super obvious one that explains why enterprises use them almost universally and know why that usage has no applicability to normal SMBs - scale."
I agree with why lots of shops might deploy systems like you are describing, even if I generally don't agree with that decision, but I'm pretty confident that the use cases that you are describing @John-Nicholson are tied, nearly universally, to a scale that would already prompt a SAN-based infrastructure (or similar.)
Have you seen these in small environments where the scale did not exist to warrant a SAN otherwise?
Just a couple of months ago - I was contacted by a prospective client , who was looking to get his website designed ... So, I went over to his office one day, for a general face-to-face, and we got talking, and quite proudly mentioned about recently acquiring a Synology DS2015 box ... which was all pretty alright, until he mentioned why .. It turned out that their vendor recommended that they migrate their one Windows 2012 server to a VM, and that, if they WANTED RELIABILITY, SCALABILITY & PERFORMANCE, they would HAVE TO, move from a local storage to a NAS .. btw, their current total data size is a little less than 1TB ... They have around 40 users ... Now, for the cherry on the cake .. The vendor took-out the 2x2TB HDDs from the server, and reused them in the new NAS box. Apart from that, they installed another 2 TB HDD in the NAS box for "Backups" (Can you believe it, I could not ), and then installed a 128 GB HDD on the server, to install Hyper-V 2012. This , the vendor said would "further increase performance,, and that they did not have to buy new HDDs, which would save money" The VMs and data were on the NAS box ...
Upon, pointing-out and explaining the rather obvious flaws in this design, the client was left rather gobsmacked ... Anyway, I designed their website, and will be taking-over the support & maintenance of their IT, once the annual contract with the existing vendor runs it course.... I recommended, that they reattach the HDDs to the server, and run everything locally, and return or try to sell-off the DS2015 box, and get a smaller one, just for back-ups (VEEAM)... I hear, that the existing vendor, recently agreed to take back the DS2015, and compensate them by installing a lower-end 4 bay box, and by extending their service contract (I'm not sure if my client is going to agree to this) ....
Shocking, no ?
This is the same practice many SMB's experience every day. The IT Vendor clearly doesn't have an expert in house, just someone who gets paid to sell hardware with enough experience to setup some basic hardware.
I'm not shocked, and glad you were able to point out the issues. I didn't see what server they have that was scaled back to just a compute node though. . .
I don't think it's about lack of knowledge or experience ... I feel, it's just about unscrupulous business practice, of up-selling something ...
