@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

I've done enterprise branch office, it's very different than an SMB, in most cases. ROBO and SMB have a lot of overlap, but a lot of differences, too.

Enterprise ROBO is different in a few cases...

1. Can I manage and monitor availability and performance of 300 sites from one dashboard isn't something I've had a SMB ask.

2. SMB's might get down to 6-20VM's at a small office with a dozen people. ROBO can be 1-2VM's in the back of a gas station/dairy queen etc.

3. Can I build an HA cluster All in (software/hardware/licensing/networking gear/UPS/Labor to deploy) for UNDER $10K is something I hear form both, but in ROBO its something that can actually be delivered on because of how spartan the hardware requirements and the existence of a primary data center to provide quorum services and absorb the shared management overhead resources.

4. SMB's typically need backup software at the edge and a traditional backup workflow and vault to cloud/offsite system. ROBO can often just be basic replication offsite, or in many cases DR/BC is handled by the application layer (although some have historically done this at the array/storage layer).

5. Some ROBO Edge systems are effectively "disposable" but they still want HA for maintenance window reasons (vMotion), or so they can have something fail and not need a 4 hour parts contract (That a SMB typically will want, as the overhead isn't murderous like it is with 400 sites).

@Kelly said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

@scottalanmiller I cannot help but feel a bit like I'm being attacked. {salesdick?}

That particular line was from @RojoLoco who is not known for mincing words in general. @scottalanmiller also has a tendency to break up his responses into multiple posts. It adds some clarity, but can be overwhelming, and he is also very blunt (although his language is less...colorful in online postings compared to Rojo). It can be a hard pill to swallow, but if you sift the wheat from the chaff you will find some very significant competitive advantages for the SMB market. I fall into the same category as most here. If a vendor doesn't post basic pricing information I will typically walk away unless there is a significant motivator aside from the product itself (peer recommendation being the largest).

To be fair, Its a channel product and channel products typically don't have "list pricing" outside of general schedule stuff.

1. You want to qualify what exactly they need. 90% of SMB"s have zero architect skill in house, and when your system uses proprietary non-traditional RAID/layouts or data reduction, or is a hybrid based system so performance sizing takes some skill you REALLY don't want people either over-quoting what they need (And not purchasing) or worse under spec'ing their needs (and the product failing to deliver).

2. The primary channel partner with deal registration gets preferential pricing and can offer you a steeper discount (This is to protect partner who staff SE's and architects and educate customers about the product, as these cost money). You don't want bob's cut rate VAR getting every sale just because they can operate at 2% lower margin than everyone else. This is bad for the partner and bad for the customer. This is why on any IT product over 20K someone will ask you why and what your using it for and some basic questions before they get a quote. They need to document this to show intent for them to "Lock" good pricing.

3. Discounts may be deeper depending on the business case your looking for it. I've seen storage vendors (and especially startups) discount and sell the starter kit of something at 80% discount (Even loose money!) because the use case shows that if it works it will grow rapidly. If your Kroger and your buying a cluster to test in a store as a pilot before you roll it out to 500 other stores your going to get deeper discounts because of the potential business upside. All kinds of factors can influence pricing by "showing your cards" in a competitive deal before you know how deep you can discount because of the potential, you are exposing yourself to loosing the deal as the customer's procurement will often quit responding to questions once they have a quote (especially if there is an internal bias for another product).

@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

@Nic said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

@scottalanmiller They said they work with Dell now.

They should really get that up on their site. If I didn't know to look at them, glancing at their current offerings would be enough to turn me away.

I think this is a meet in the channel thing (Kinda like Nutanix and Cisco, or like Scale's relationship with Dell). Its not explicitly jointly supported, but they have pre-install and possible redirected OEM support.

@scottalanmiller

@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:

@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:

If the original backup host fails in 90 days, the client is then on the hook to Microsoft. It's far cheaper to purchase a second standard license then to worry about it.

Not in 99.999% of cases. Remember you are talking about a double failure, not a single failure. So let's run the numbers assuming a single license is $700.

For 90 Day Failover Window Licensing Cost: $700
For Sub 90 Day Double Failover Licensing Cost: $1400

The drug you are looking for is failing over to reduce maintenance window times for host/hypervisor patching every patch Tuesday (assuming Hyper-V).

I just showed up to say you are all wrong

They should buy Software Assurance which will let them migrate that license back and forth whenever they want at a lower cost than buying a full stand alone license.

@scottalanmiller

@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:

Nothing wrong with tape on its own. But I would explain to them that this is a mismatch of needs. They clearly dont' see themselves as a viable business, but as a hobby (no virtualization.) If they don't virtualize, they can't reasonably say that they think this is a real business, they are SO far below the home line it isn't even discussable. No grey area at all, this is a hobby and a joke to their owners. Make that absolutely clear.

Scott your insulting hobbyists. Most of the OS instances in my house are virtual. My home datacenter looks down on their business practices.

@Dashrender said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

@thwr said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

@Dashrender said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

@thwr said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

@Dashrender said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

@david.wiese said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

The question that should be asked is does the dedication to the IT industry mean you should sacrifice your hobbies?

A better question, if IT isn't your hobby, should you have a different job? One that more closely matches you true likes and desires.

Would you ask a car mechanic the same who doesn't want to fix cars in his free time?

If I'm hiring a car mechanic for high end cars or something like Indy car racing - absolutely, and if they said no.. I'd bin their application. NTG is at the top of the field. Some companies put themselves there. They want the most enthusiastic for IT group they can get. As Danielle said, you can't teach enthusiasm, but you can teach skills. So far, their needs have been met buy people with either both enthusiasm and skills or just enthusiasm, and they taught them the skills. when the work pool starts to dry up, and they have fewer choices, they will have to be less picky on who they pick.

I agree from a personal point of view. But I can't expect everyone to be like this. Maybe someone just wants to do his job, that's ok. We should keep a few things in mind here:

• Salary
• Position
• Goals

for example. I wouldn't expect a Level 1 helpdesk tech to have a small datacenter in his basement, he care barely live from what he carries home. If we are talking about a 100-150k+ position, it's a whole different story.

and I wouldn't expect NTG to higher a Level 1 helpdesk person either. I had junk equipment in the mid 90's in my apt for lab gear that I paid pennies for, just so I would have stuff to learn on.

I suppose I could agree that as you get older (north of 35) the need for a home lab is less (especially because of today's options), but when you're young.... you need to be hungry! If you don't want to spend a lot of time learning/playing with this stuff, then I ask, is this really the field for you?

I have like 3 old systems that would be great for a young guy home lab that I need to dump on someone... As you get older the stuff you test isn't low level infrastructure so much as higher level stuff that you can lab out on other environments etc. Also you should have a work lab with the resources for this stuff. IF I really want I can use Ravello for free and spin up stuff on AWS.

Home lab

2 x 5 bay Synology NAS's.
Managed 24Gbps port switch
7 x Intel NUC's (Some Gen6's with 32GB of RAM).
Firewall (Running Ubiquity edge router for VPN termination, and IDS, routing on a stick for things NSX isn't handling etc).

Work lab.

I have access to a a lot of machines. Primary cluster right now is 12 hosts with 20 core boxes, 256GB of RAM, and 6 flash drives each, 10Gbps (2 ports) and 2 x 1Gbps ports (management) with enterprise out of band licensed. Currently running a storage lab to test some workflows, will likely be testing some monitoring and automation frameworks with it soon.

20 network printers - Printer support is one of the lowest tiers of IT pay. Saying you worked somewhere too poor to outsource it (or have a tier 1 bench guy to deal with it) implies lower wages.

 Configured and maintained several virtual environments, including Windows XP and Microsoft Server 2003 - A 16 year old, and 13 year old operating system have nothing to do with a virtual environment. This line right here I would have thrown out the resume over.

Deployed several ADP time clock server systems for use both locally and out of state - How about Deployed and supported HR tracking system across state lines. Time clocks also are pretty low on the pay value standpoint.

 Developed and implemented several quality control processes. Tell me more specifically as well as what the outcome was. Ex. "Standardized on a common image and application deployment system with SCCM and Airwatch to cut new employee setup from 1 week to 15 minutes, with Mobile device app deployment being self service." What you did, what business problem it fixed, and how impactful was it.

Organized several networking closets, maintaining business continuity and reducing network latency. Another meaningless sentence. "Brought in structured cabling, flattened 3 tier network design to leaf spine, solving multicast problems for imaging performance, and reducing the support and management costs by 50%" Cleaning up some cables in a closet, and color coding them makes it sound like you didn't have much productive work to do and were bored.

 Managed setup and maintenance of Active Directory, Windows 2003 server - More highly generic phrasing. - Deployed GPO's to homogenize configurations, automate printer and application deployments of end user devices, and reduce application ticket support by 60%. Your original sentence implies you had a single 2003 server in the entire place, and somehow that kept you occupied for 5 years. This isn't something I'd want to highlight that the environment was this small/simple.

Network Administrator Junior - So this place had one server and you were the junior guy? I tend to drop superlative title bits that don't really make sense (I would simply say network administrator). I used to have a title that was 4 works long (Junior Assistant Systems Analyst) or some nonsense that 3 of the 4 words implied I was a lackey. I simply put Systems Administrator (What most closely tied to my job) on my resume.

@Veet said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

@DustinB3403

@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 ...

Stupidity, and there's multiple people to blame.

1. Small business's are not blameless, they should seek good advice and consulting. When they hire people who they pay less per hour than geek squad this is what you get. By refusing to pay real consulting rates, this is what they end up getting...

2. Small consulting shops that center around Hyper-V these days seem to be in love with building clusters on prosumer grade QNAP/synology etc. As there is no deal registration its not actually something they can "mark up" much. It does add a lot of labor, but you have to look at these shops training commitment (or often lack there of). They tend to be fed with cert mill grade MCSE's who learned out to make a Hyper-V cluster and Microsoft's storage curriculum emphasis this without ever discussing quality of storage. (Meanwhile a VCP 5.5 or newer will cover scale out local storage as there are quite a few VSAN questions on that test).

3. There is a growing trend where the self taught IT guy in the SMB's knoledge is drifting farther and farther from the enterprise. The tools and best practices are making the "Cargo Cult of the Enterprise" even more dangerous.

As far as a shop with only a single server instance I'm starting to ask why even bother? Why not host the application, get as many of your apps delivered by SaaS, and leverage MDM/MAM/SSO tools and move away from the need for GPO or local domain for management.

Does doing this cost a little more? Sure. It does however give you a much more transparent cost to IT (Your not assuming risks because the SLA's are fairly well known and far more absolute from a SaaS provider these days than a server in a closet).

I think our real boogyman in the (S in SMB) is not the guy with the Synology but anyone advocating physically local servers at all. Servers with some exceptions for SME's or niche industries increasingly belong in datacenters.

@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

I think we've reached stasis here. I've provided examples where the platform matters.

Okay, I'll buy that. The platform matters when internal IT has failed and you outsourced to an external IT department who has an interest in selling you something that you don't need to make extra money on probably the sale and definitely the consulting. Yes, I agree, but I don't agree that that doesn't match my original point. It's not in the interst of the customer, but there is a reason why they feel that they have to do it based on other decisions made in the same way.

Do you feel, however, that since this discussion is based on scale for the context of the original question, that there is ever a realistic time that this happens at three or fewer compute nodes? We are talking about three nodes for an entire business here. What business, anywhere, is that small and deploying systems where vendors interact with them in this manner? I'm not saying that theoretically it isn't possible, but this thread is asking for an example where this has ever happened.

Outside of pure theory, and even there I feel that it is hard to theorize, who has products that need these kinds of things while being so small as to not have benefits of the IPOD due to scale?

Sure. If the customer has oracle or SQL 2016 or Windows Datacenter or other licensing per socket, simply shaving down from 3 nodes to 2 could be significant.

I've also seen companies where they had a site with very low compute requirements (Port facility) where they needed to scale deep (400TB for Video archive). Replicated local or RAIN is crazy more expensive on this (they spend 87K on a HUS with a RAID 60 style DP pool for this if memory serves, good luck buying 800 or 1600TB of disks for that price...

I know you like trying to find absolute rules for the SMB (which to be honest they kind of need, because if there's anything I learned from consulting in that space, or watching random SpiceWorks comments it is that everyone is at a subconscious level drawn towards awful idea's) but we are running increasingly into a world of workloads and needs that completely have no relation to what that company or site's industry or employee count is. Simple exclusionary rules make even less sense.

Its like decisions on RAID for storage systems. Increasingly the historic rules (Deploy RAID 10, and size for capacity) is becoming awful advice, and with most storage systems that are modern its not even something you can choose anymore as the decision is abstracted at a RAIN level (or in the case of most modern storage appliances it a fixed erasure code set based on a stripe width of their NVRAM's ability to destage a write). The real savior of the SMB here is platforms, appliances and systems that remove the ability to go off and do something stupid, rather than "hard and fast rules" that increasingly don't matter (or are wrong).

@scottalanmiller

@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?

The deployment of shared storage (in whatever form it takes) I view about a demand for operational flexibility more than just a flat driver for availability of apps that can't HA themselves. The assumption that a SAN is driven entirely by scale alone, or HA alone is a false assumption.

Until HCI became more mainstream a DAS synchronous array (like his HUS) was really as bullet proof as you could get and still enjoy the operational benefit. Still for some customers (My old industry of TAS) that "pet rock" type deployment still has value over HCI.

1. 2 nodes is still limited for HCI. For mission critical environments with low skills in house (which is the TAS industry) true 2 node shared nothing systems still pose some risk (Quorum is not a concept they easily grasp, and in house staff are fully capable of screwing it up and split braining things). Shared DAS is far harder to @#$@ up. HCI can scale down, but as you have to have witness systems (And DRDB's common use with heartbeat of an IP I find to be a bullshit excuse of a witness system as it lacks state) there is extra complexity that can be beyond many steady state ops teams.

2. White glove service (including onsite no matter where the hell the deployment is) has power. There's a lot you can do remote, but when the storage layer goes down, having a technician onsite who's badged and knows WTF they are doing is a powerful force. The farther up the stack you go this becomes less critical but for low level services that are stateful (and network used to access remotely) there is still value in good on site techs.

Now I recognize that most of this can be mitigated by outsourcing infrastructure operations. But at that point why would I buy a scale cluster (Vs. just put my stuff in one of the major public clouds, or THOUSANDS of VCAN partners who can hit my niche of compliance, operations capabilities, PaaS, and geographic connectivity requirements?). I"m seeing hundreds of public cloud providers adopt HCI, and realistically if the benefits (from cost, scaling etc) can be done in a hosted enviroment where there is better operations, engineering I would argue the real counter argument for small shops is not

HCI (with something like Scale) vs SAN, but rather HCI vs. Hosted Now maybe that is Scales end game (Have some key MSP partners they drive customers towards using) but building multi-tenant tools are hard, and that's a heavy arms race that will require quite a bit of capital to get right and would stray so far from their target market I don't see it.

@scottalanmiller

@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?

Have you see a flexpod or vBlock? Part of CI is defining the network switches and configuration of the fabric. The argument is even with a 20% capital markup the time to outcome out weighs the do it yourself approach, and historically they are right. The difference is going from CI to HCI has moved the time to value down exponentially. I think the logical progression for HCI vendors in some area's is to do just this.

Scale (long before you worked with them) in the old GPFS days had a stricter HCL for switches than any other iSCIS storage vendor I had ever seen. You know what, there was a reason. Scale out systems are incredibly vulnerable to shifty low end switching. I even tried deploying one with 3750X's (much more expensive than the 2910AL's, but practically much slower) and performance was awful until switches were replaced. The funny thing was the customer tried to blame scale (and not the slow Cisco switches that the network team was in love with). I would argue Scale is "ahead of the curve" in having HCL's and restrictions on outside factors that can make them look bad (this was something like 5 years ago).

@scottalanmiller

@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

There was thread on SW recently where someone said "NIMBLE SUCKS I DON"T GET THE IOPS I PROMISED". The next post was his Nimble sales rep posting "So I see your at 20% load, your IO latency is .5 ms currently and while your 220C model is one of our smaller ones we have far larger ones. If your having any problems please call us and we will help you" I laughed, but it made me realize the damage that incompetent IT do to the name of a product or application. We are at the point that a sales rep would rather piss off a customer and call them out as an idiot (he was nice about it) than risk their companies name being drug through the mud.

That's not incompetence, though. That's just someone lying. there is a difference.

I learned years ago to never prescribe malice to what you can attribute to ignorance in this industry. He likely was unhappy the number in his dashboard didn't say 100K!

One last thought...

IF the reason that Xen has 2% market share is because there is NO LOGICAL REASON for vSphere or paid Hyper-V (with VMM to manage) then that means 98% of IT people are idiots. If 98% are idiots, wouldn't that mean they should be outsourcing their IT as much as possible to their vendors or others? (and therefore not deploy Xen).

Catch-22

@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

If I buy a couch or desk that's massive for a tiny apartment I could see the sales guy asking how big my door way is to make sure they can deliver it.

Would you honestly still do business with a furniture store that didn't state the size (that's demanding certain performance, the results not the means) but rather demanded that you buy a certain make or style of door regardless of the fact that the one that you had would have been big enough? because that's the comparison.

Making sure that the SIZE is right I always agreed to. Demanding only doors from certain vendors be used is where the insanity happens. Or forcing you to install a new door because they don't trust your measurements.

I think we've reached stasis here. I've provided examples where the platform matters.

@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

Application owners have RPO/RTO's and they expect the infrastructure people to often take care of that. (When I have a 5TB OLTP database, in guest options generally fail to deliver somehow).

Yup, and if they outside IT to the application vendor, that SLA isn't owned by the actual IT department but by someone who came in, put in something new and ran away. If the application owners need a reliable RPO/RTO, they need to work with IT, not work against them.

Its the reality in most companies. Software vendors requirements are not rooted in how IT SHOULD be run, but how it does. I agree with you in principal (it shouldn't matter) I've just seen hundreds of counter examples that would have destroyed these companies names.

There was thread on SW recently where someone said "NIMBLE SUCKS I DON"T GET THE IOPS I PROMISED". The next post was his Nimble sales rep posting "So I see your at 20% load, your IO latency is .5 ms currently and while your 220C model is one of our smaller ones we have far larger ones. If your having any problems please call us and we will help you" I laughed, but it made me realize the damage that incompetent IT do to the name of a product or application. We are at the point that a sales rep would rather piss off a customer and call them out as an idiot (he was nice about it) than risk their companies name being drug through the mud.

The "IT guy is always" right attitude in IT bothers me. Part of why I always enjoyed arguing with you (and others internally) as its the only way to challenge my idea's and learn and thing of new things. Part of the reason I enjoyed consulting (although I did learn a lot of tact of how to carefully make people think it was their idea, or gently expose why what they were doing was hilariously a bad idea).

@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

Backups - (Some Hypervisors have changed block tracking so a backup takes minutes, others don't meaning a full can take hours). BTW I hear Hyper-V is getting this in 2016 (Veeam had to write their own for their platform).

Sure... but what does the application layer care? Either the application takes care of its own backups and doesn't care what the hypervisor does, or it relies on IT to handle backups and it isn't any of their concern either.

Again, this is an application vendor or programmer trying to get involved in IT decisions, processes and designs. Do you let the company that makes your sofa determine how big your fireplace has to be because "they want to ensure that you are cozy?"

Application owners have RPO/RTO's and they expect the infrastructure people to often take care of that. (When I have a 5TB OLTP database, in guest options generally fail to deliver somehow).

If I buy a couch or desk that's massive for a tiny apartment I could see the sales guy asking how big my door way is to make sure they can deliver it. Otherwise I'll be saying "GALLERY FURNITURE SUCKS THEY SELL COUCHES THAT DON"T WORK". This is what users, application owners, and infrastructure people do today. Vendors MUST protect their name. I'm not saying these whiners make any sense, but people do this.

@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

Because performance and availability problems come from the bottom up not the top down. SQL has storage as a dependency, storage doesn't have SQL as a dependency, and everything rolls downhill...

That doesn't make sense, though. Applications care that they have enough CPU, memory, IOPS, bandwidth, etc. That's it. They don't care how it is delivered, only that it is available when needed. This would be, again, a failing of any application team and any IT team if they look to the application for issues involving not providing enough resources for performance.

If your point here is that incompetent IT departments tend to buy unsupportable, crappy software.. sure. No one is denying that people don't do their jobs well. But that doesn't mean we should recommend doing things poorly just because lots of people aren't good at their jobs.

Most IT departments (Even enterprises) are not skilled (or skilled well) at troubleshooting infrastructure (Especially beats like ERP that might have a dozen interdependent systems) without assistance. Most ERP vendors know this and so rather than let the customers deploy a database for 20K users on a Hyper-V host with a 3 Disk RAID 5 (and then the project be written off as a failure and their name be damaged) take this choice away.

For the 5 years I consulted "why is this slow" was one of the most common engagements. 9/10 of the time I was chasing some crazy application issue it had nothing to do with the application. Generally it was staring people in the face, had a giant RED alarm, and was fairly obvious (Disk latency isn't supposed to be 1200ms, and NL-SAS drives shouldn't be used for DB's in 5 billion dollar companies Yo?). Assuming that vendors are crossing a line by assuming internal IT doesn't understand what it will take to deliver their applications is CRITICAL to being a successful application vendor. I've seen users, IT and C-suite trash applications that worked fine, but the infrastructure was all wrong....

This is part of a huge reason for many vendors pushing for SaaS offerings, or OPEX offerings. If you don't bundle high levels of support that can extend beyond the application your risking your revenue. Much like why Scale (and other highly successful HCI vendors) try to own support of the ENTIRE stack. If they didn't own support of the hypervisor people would do awful, awful things then blame them.

Its not fair, but its the reality we live in...

@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

SAP HANA is a incredible pain in the ass to tune and setup, and depending on the underlying disk engine may have different block sizing or other best practices. This is one of the times where things like NUMA affinity can actually make or break an experience. Getting their support to understand a platform enough to help customers tune this, their PSO assist in deployments, and their support identify known problems with the partner ecosystem means they are incredibly restrictive (Hence they ares still defining HCI requirements).

Right, so at this point you are talking about outsourcing your IT department as this isn't application work, this is infrastructure work. So this is turning into a completely different discussion. Now you are hiring an external IT consulting group that doesn't know the platform(s) that you might be running. That's a totally different discussion.

But what we are talking about here is needing an application vendor to do underlying IT work for them. It's a different animal. It does happen and there is nothing wrong with outsourcing IT work, obviously, I'm a huge proponent of that. But there is no need to get it from the application vendor, that some do might make sense in some cases, that application teams demand that they also be your IT department is a problem unless you are committed to them delivering their platform as an appliance and it should be treated that way in that case. Nothing wrong with that per se and a lot of places do just that.

This is largely SAP's support model today. They have validated appliance or tightly controlled RA's. Honestly making in memory database work is such a niche skill set I don't blame them for demanding to take that on for two reasons.

1. Its weird work most in house IT will not know.
2. They can charge a ton of money.
3. No one complains because if your using HANA for what its intended the 2 million you spend on it is a joke vs the benefit it brings to your org.