Network restructuring advice
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@scottalanmiller said:
You are running email in house? I'd get a meeting together to discuss making that hosted as a first step. That could be something that you don't have to deal with at all.
I mentioned that to them already just to get a feel of where they stand, so far they seem somewhat paranoid about it, but I don't think it's something I can't convince them to move.
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@whizzard said:
I mentioned that to them already just to get a feel of where they stand, so far they seem somewhat paranoid about it, but I don't think it's something I can't convince them to move.
Like most things, if they feel paranoid it is because they don't understand. All of the things that they told you they want should rule them out running their own email. Security, stability, uptime, protection... those don't go with in house email. Remind them that security and uptime don't mix with hubris or reckless "throwing darts" decision making.
If they want IT to make good decisions, management can't just make uninformed technical decisions. Ask them why they feel that as non-IT they would have any input into whether it is hosted or not? If they are making the call to be insecure and risky, why do they tell you to do the opposite. Make them explain their irrationality.
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@whizzard said:
....but I don't think it's something I can't convince them to move.
Don't convince them to move, explain to them that they've already mandated to you to do so as part of the requirements already given.
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I personally use Google Apps, many recommend Office 365, but having seen some global downtime with them, I am a bit apprehensive. Also know Rackspace has some options as well. But so far other than the limited features of the outdated Zimbra, the email hasn't required much yet. So with a backup host in a co-location site and better email server software, will it still be better to move to hosted emails?
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@whizzard said:
I personally use Google Apps, many recommend Office 365, but having seen some global downtime with them, I am a bit apprehensive.
Define downtime and risk. How much downtime have you seen? How much downtime do you fear? How many incoming emails (down to customers) happened? How much data loss? How much impact was there?
Now look at internal email. Try to assess the same risks there. You can't make internal email as reliable as these services without spending a fortune and even then, it is unlikely. You can get lucky for large periods of time, but overall, the downtime is going to be higher. And different, it requires IT scrambling, no resources to deal with other issues and no infrastructure for failover.
Honestly, a little email downtime is pretty minor when email handling is still working. Security and data protection are the big issues and you can't remotely touch those self hosting.
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@whizzard said:
So with a backup host in a co-location site and better email server software, will it still be better to move to hosted emails?
Unless you have a regulatory reason or a massive network problem keeping you from going hosted, I know of no reliability, security or data protection reason that would make you run in house under any circumstances. Email is a commodity service that cannot be run in house as effectively as it can be hosted. Using IT resources to run email is no different than using them to run a web server. It's wasteful and inefficient. There is no competitive advantage in running email in house.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@whizzard said:
So with a backup host in a co-location site and better email server software, will it still be better to move to hosted emails?
Unless you have a regulatory reason or a massive network problem keeping you from going hosted, I know of no reliability, security or data protection reason that would make you run in house under any circumstances. Email is a commodity service that cannot be run in house as effectively as it can be hosted. Using IT resources to run email is no different than using them to run a web server. It's wasteful and inefficient. There is no competitive advantage in running email in house.
Understood
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@whizzard said:
So with a backup host in a co-location site and better email server software....
What's better than Zimbra?
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I would rebuild that CentOS 5 machine from scratch while doing this. Don't migrate it. Time to be on CentOS 7.
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CentOS 5 is roughly like being on Windows Server 2003 R2.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@whizzard said:
So with a backup host in a co-location site and better email server software....
What's better than Zimbra?
MDaemon?
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@whizzard said:
MDaemon?
Not a bad product and really nice guys, we know them well (we hang out in their offices and go drinking with them.) But it's a small, SMB focused Windows app not on the same level as Zimbra. MDaemon makes a ton of sense for people needing to run email in house who can't manage Linux machines and are stuck on Windows and don't need the complexity of Exchange. But you'd be moving from top end enterprise to SMB focused and from free to not free. You'd be moving away from "makes sense to run in house" in every way.
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Zimbra, for example, has full HA built in.
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@scottalanmiller beating the dead horse of in house email is like @scottalanmiller beating the dead horse of RAID 5 on spinning rust. It is something you learn to listen to in the proper context.
The world does not run in the nice pretty black and white that his arguements for the subject try to make them. Yes, he is 100% technically correct and it IS the job of IT to recommend the best solution for the business.
But it is not our job to run a point into the ground once a business makes a decision. This does not mean that the business is going to go under. In fact the costs clearly show that moving a from EXISTING in house email to a hosted solution is expensive. Until such a time that an email server is needing to be replace or significantly changed the cost in employee time on top of the new monthly costs for the hosted service typically do not balance out.
Yes, you need to factor in what expected labor costs misc. down times would have cost. Yes their are other costs that begin to go away over time. Yes, the advantages of hosted are large. No that does not mean that every business should just move all their shit right now.
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@JaredBusch said:
But it is not our job to run a point into the ground once a business makes a decision. This does not mean that the business is going to go under.
Which I did not suggest it was. But I was pointing out that hosted should be considered and probably recommended, that there are reasons to be in house and that the reasons he was wondering about for avoiding hosted were the opposite of the reasons you would use to move in that direction.
In no way did I paint a gloom and doom scenario, only that one solution appears to be the clear winner in both the current and proposed cases. No matter how reliably one solution wins as "best" does not imply that second place is dysfunctional (RAID 5 is the same way, there are plenty of cases where it is not a disaster even though there are none where it would be deployed following good analysis.)
The idea here was simply that he was feeling that he might have factors that make hosted not ideal, but those factors are generally not resulting in the direction he was envisioning.
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@whizzard said:
SSD
@scottalanmiller said:
@whizzard said:
Is it advisable to mix HDD types in a RAID? i.e. SSDs with non SSDs?
It is not advisable to mix drives in any way if possible. You want absolutely identical drives in every way for optimum value, wear and performance. Even two drives of the same basic specs (size, spindle speed) is not as good as totally identical drives. You want all spindle and arm movements to align whenever possible.
I assumed it was a best practise to mix drive brands or models for HDDs in case of manufacturer defects, all you drives wouldn't suffer from the same issue which otherwise may make them likely to fail at once. I thought the firmware issues and other shortcoming of SSDs would have cause for the same rational.
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@whizzard said:
I assumed it was a best practise to mix drive brands or models for HDDs in case of manufacturer defects, all you drives wouldn't suffer from the same issue which otherwise may make them likely to fail at once. I thought the firmware issues and other shortcoming of SSDs would have cause for the same rational.
Neither is the case. All drives should match. The idea of mixing has been one of those enduring myths of the small business market. No enterprise IT shop does anything like this and no enterprise vendor supports it. What they sometime encourage, and makes sense, is mixing order dates and manufacturing runs for this reason, but never drives of different models or manufacturers. As it is, drives do not die all together as often imagined as long as they aren't manufactured in the same run.
The problem here is that there is a myth of drives having a shared failure rate which has been used as the basis of a myth around how to mitigate that imagined risk.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
What are you thinking about for backups? Once you're completely virtualized you could use Veeam, or you could look at getting a Unitrends box (though be prepared for several thousand dollar bill on that one). It doesn't appear that you can use the Drobo as a backup target, as you mentioned it's already being used for live data.
Unitrends does not require an appliance. He could run it as a VM on HyperV or XS and backup to the Drobo.
Doesn't mean the cost would be much less. Last time I looked, their licensing was pretty stiff. Of course, if the free version would work for him.... he might be set...
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@Dashrender said:
Agreed, must of us can't. But even so, years of uptime make this a hard sell at best, impossible at worst.
It should cause no problem at all. It's the seatbelt issue. You simply need to explain that getting lucky is very different than being reliable. You don't drive without a seatbelt for a few years and claim that wearing one isn't needed despite years of not going through the windshield, right?
No remotely rational adult is going to argue with reliability over getting lucky if it is presented properly.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Agreed, must of us can't. But even so, years of uptime make this a hard sell at best, impossible at worst.
It should cause no problem at all. It's the seatbelt issue. You simply need to explain that getting lucky is very different than being reliable. You don't drive without a seatbelt for a few years and claim that wearing one isn't needed despite years of not going through the windshield, right?
No remotely rational adult is going to argue with reliability over getting lucky if it is presented properly.
No one's saying they are going to argue over the rationality, but I've seen many continue with the "we're lucky" mindset.
