@ajstringham said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Hubtech said:

Well, that's what marketing has become. Keywords, essentialy #'s for consumers.

Only because it works. Marketers would use whatever customers make work. Customers drive the change.

That's debatable. Most people simply accept what they're given, in this context. The media pushes something, people accept it and further the process. It's like how everyone wears American Eagle, Hollister, Aeropostale, etc shirts. We're walking billboards. We want those shirts because everyone else does and they want it because they think it makes them cool, based on what they've been told/heard from the media. It all starts somewhere.

In this case it starts with the consumers. As they are the ones assuming claims that are not made.

@Nic said:

What is best in life?

Webroot

@Carnival-Boy said:

@scottalanmiller said:

But what you can know is that almost no SAN vendor makes a server on par with a Proliant.

IIRC some HP SANs are or were Proliants. I recall the HP 4300 was basically a Proliant. When we were looking at getting a pair, we were basically told our existing Proliant was at risk of failure and in order to mitigate this risk we needed to effectively replace it with two Proliants, plus some software to keep the two in sync. It's adding redundancy to something that I've never personally had fail.

But like the majority of SMEs, we have no redundancy at the software level. We're running single databases for our ERP system and for our Exchange system, for example. So if the database fails we're down. Having a SAN would just mean the failure occurs across two pieces of hardware instead of one.

Another point to make about redundancy. I am really, really confident about the ability of my Proliants to handle disk failure. I've had quite a few over the years, and am now pretty relaxed about the process. That little red light comes on, I phone HP, a new drive arrives, I pop out the old drive, I pop in the new drive, the lights flash, and I walk away. Completely confident that the array will rebuild. It still makes me nervous, but it's a controlled nervousness. I doubt having a SAN fail is anywhere near as straightforward. My point being that I like simple redundancy, I dislike complex redundancy.

Exactly.

Many HP low end SANs are in fact Proliants. Often setup by DotHill and not by HP.

I don't want to shame the vendor, it was just a shocking admission for a vendor to post.

Even here in our country photo's are little biased. It happen to me before i ordered the food because it looks great thought that the taste is delicious but when i saw the actual food sigh not the same in the picture.

Typically, we recommend grouping VMs with similar guest OS into the same job, as it guarantees better deduplication rates. Also, it's worth indeed deploying Veeam ONE, since it provides you with up-to-date information regarding your Virtual, as well as, Backup Infrastructure.

Thanks.

@Carnival-Boy said:

@scottalanmiller said:

I think you are confusing "having skills" or "having experience" with taking the time to know the competition, taking the time to know the customer, being willing to send them to a completely different solution that you can't meet.

I'm not confusing anything.

If you change the thread title from "Why You Don't Get Advice from Vendors" to "Why you should maintain a healthy scepticism about advice you get from vendors, why you should engage with multiple vendors and why should verify all vendor advice with your own independent research" then I agree with you completely.

Mostly you are just pointing out all the weaknesses and caveats of vendor advice. That's all to the good, but that is not the same thing as saying you should never get advice from a vendor. Getting advice from a vendor is a great way to learn and a great way to help source new products and solutions. I'd advise all IT pros to get as much advice as possible from as many people as possible - and that includes, but is not limited to, vendors.

No it is exactly the same. You should never get advice from a vendor. Our company works the same as NTG, we are consultants. We refuse to become resellers for any product because that will taint our advice. This is why I do not identify our company as a MSP anymore, because most MSP companies are reselling something. This means they are not actually giving you unbiased advice. They will be giving you advice they makes their company more money.

True, that most will still work on anything, but they will always be pushing Dell over HP or something similar.

@alexntg said:

A few years ago, I was recovering from burnout and took a helpdesk position. It was low-stress, low-workload, and extremely relaxing. Sometimes taking a step back isn't all that bad to do. If I hadn't been recruited away, I'd likely still be there.

That's kinda what I did with my current job, went from an MSP, to Goodwill, to another MSP to help desk / internal IT for a single office. All involved IT help desk in some way except this job, where it's software support only. Been less stressed and given some room to move and do things but I miss having projects and different environments.