On the other hand, if you’re still and XP shop and about to upgrade, going to 8 might make sense. I agree that as butt-ugly as the new UI is on a desktop, MS seems to be committed to it. If you plan to stay a MS shop then skip 7 and bite the bullet. Committing now gives you time to perhaps roll out Classic Shell to ease the transition.

I wouldn’t underestimate the cost associated with lost productivity, however. It’s something we in IT tend to do all too readily. Consider, however, this in real-dollar terms. If you have a $20 an hour employee and they only lose 10% productivity during a 6 week transition period (4hr loss per week * 6 weeks * $20) that comes to $480 per employee for that period. Given that Win8 Pro retails for $199, it becomes clear acquisition costs are the LEAST of your budget concerns.

Lost productivity is real and costs real money.

Most companies could, if the need arose, do a forklift upgrade on a weekend without any business impact or nominal, at best, as long as they had the foresight to plan the process properly.

Today, technical advances are taking place by the boatload, every day. Anybody who begins college learning current computer programming has obsolete skills by the time he or she graduates from college four years later. As IT professionals, we are constantly re-learning our jobs every day. Microsoft releases a new version of Windows and changes the way we interact with our computers; our human nature kicks in and we want to keep doing things the old way. But for the technology to continue to advance, human nature must be overcome so we can best utilize the advances in the technology.

Also with the rumors that MS is going on a very accelerated OS release schedule it may be worth sitting W8 out to see where MS may take it.

Which all totally differs for Server 2012. While the UI can be an impediment it is far less so given an IT Pro can work around the changes far quicker than the average user. I know personally I am going to be deploying Server 2012 for every server that I can muster.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/why-you-never-let-vendor-design-your-network-213618

http://9gag.com/gag/6679725

As of right now I am just in the middle of a XP to W7 migration at my new business, so there is still time for MS to redeem itself. If it were not for the lack of critical application on the Mac platform I would have pulled the trigger on new Minis. But we are still to far out to phase out critical CRM/SCM/ERP solutions with only thick Windows applications. Two years down the road, who knows.

Thanks!

But the storage industry has changed and evolved thanks to company like Drobo. Their Beyond Raid technology give ability to grow your SAN as your business grow. By removing the smallest drive in your array and replace them with bigger drive without any downtime is unprecedented in the storage industries.

Very interesting articles for sure. I just found the site so I have not went through them all but I will be reading a lot more I am sure.

I recently moved into a new job where we have 6 physical servers, one of which is used for virtualization, a large NAS and tape backup system. These servers are old (3 to 4 years) and in the new year I will be putting together a proposal to have them replaced. I was originally thinking to replace them with 2 much more powerful physical servers, and virtualize everything using Hyper-V or VMWare.

I have also been on SpiceWorks and read about the SAM-SD it sounds like a far better option than the old NAS that we currently have. Creating the SAM-SD would give better performance and be cheaper than buying a new NAS from what I have read. My problem is that I am very familiar with Windows, but no so familiar with Linux. I have not seen how it is possible to create a SAM-SD with only Windows, although I have read that it may be possible. Perhaps I should just take the plunge and learn about FreeNAS.

I noticed that the previous IT person used the NAS for ALL application installs and data. Is that a typical way or doing things or would it be better to just install apps on local storage and use the SAM-SD/NAS for data?

All that being said in your “Choosing a Storage Type” you recommend Local storage over NAS, so perhaps it would be better to just set up Local storage in a OBR10 configuration and use the SAM-SD/NAS just for backup?

Any advice or comments you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Happy Holidays!

Tim

If there’s a major network outage in Site A, Site B is still running because they have their own on-premise servers. And if there’s a natural disaster in Site B (flood, hurricane, etc) then Site A doesn’t suffer because again, they had their own servers.

Given that situation, reducing all ten to one is a no brainer. Saves a fortune in cost and makes the overall system far less risky. Having tens systems, any one of which is just as likely to fail as the others, is incredibly risky compared to having just one for a normal spread of workloads.

It depends on how the systems are used, but any amount of system interdependence means that integration and consolidation is hugely beneficial. If you are going to have outages of systems, you want them to overlap as much as possible rather than being spread out. It’s about reducing the impact of the outage.

Some businesses can run well with, for example, email down. But more often than not, having email, AD or ERP systems offline means that the overall impact is far greater than the loss of 10% of the computing infrastructure would suggest.

In read-only systems there would be exceptions to this, but in a situation where writes are trivial the performance advantage would heavily fall to RAID 6 over RAID 5 + Hot Spare due to the extra spindle.