50Micron.com

Ok – I just had an interaction with a “technical” support rep from Symantec that is quite simply driving me insane.

I want to thank “Shajeewin” for renewing my objection to outsourcing jobs overseas.  Yes people, it’s cheaper.  But then again you do get what you pay for.

Background:  I am trying to set up a customer who wants to push a DR image of ONE system across the internet to my storage.  Initial push about 30G, daily updates in the megabytes range.  The hard part is this customer isn’t the type to spend a lot of money on Bandwidth, so went with Verizon DSL, with it’s whopping 128K upstream speed.

My solution for this was to sneaker-net the initial recovery point, and then push the incremental updates over the wire.  Simple, right?

So I look at Norton/Symantec Ghost.  First option, I’ve always liked Norton.

I’m changing my mind about that QUICKLY.

Here is the chat that ensued (with my comments thrown in)

(continue reading…)

Well – thanks to a contract glitch I’m spending a few weeks off work. No biggie, and I’ll be back before you know it.  It’s been a great opportunity to get some stuff down around the house, build my new workstation, get backups under control, etc.

My new workstation is a riot, started out Building an updated workstation, ended up something completely…well….other.

The particulars:

• SuperMicro Serverboard
• Dual Xeon Quad-Core processors
• 16GB of Buffered/Registered/ECC memory
• Dual NVidia dual-head video cards.  (4 heads total)
• Emulex LP9002-DC Fibre Card
• Generic BDRAM drive.

It’s nuts.   First think you’ll note, no hard-drives.  I’m booting from the Clariion.  Set up a dedicated Raid-Group and built a 128G Raid-1/0 lun for the boot volume.

Lastly, the Operating System.  Well I couldn’t use Windows7 for the OS, as much as I wanted to, because PowerPath doesn’t support Windows7 (yet?) so I went with Windows 2008 R2, x64.  Nicely you can put it in desktop mode (by adding the “Desktop Experience” feature) and it does basically the same thing.  A copy of VMWare server and I run anything that requires XP in a VM.  (Like my work VPN c;oemt, which *HATES* 2008, or 64bit, or both.

The greatest part is booting from the SAN I have nightly snapshots taken of the OS volume, which makes life easier in case I blow something up.

It even runs World of Warcraft, which of course was also a requirement.

Ok, the way government budgeting/purchasing scares the hell out of me as an engineer, and as a tax-payer it gets me absolutely barking.

It starts off in the budget.  Department heads go around and ask all of their people how much money they’re going to need to do their job.  When supplied with this information, Department head then goes and multiplies that number by 2 and adds about 10 million for good measure just to be sure.

Those budgets are then fed up the food chain.  Every person who handles the budget adds 10-20% for good measure, their little pet project, or anything else they can come up with.

This number goes in front of congress.  Congress immediately approves the budget because they don’t know a SAN box from a NAS box from a Kleenex box.  (Seriously, like 16 brain cells between them)

Budget approved, spending starts.

About six months from the end of the fiscal year, someone realizes that “hey – we have all this money left over for some reason.”

Here’s the painful part.  They start making stuff up to spend it on.  Absolutely ridiculous stuff when it comes down to it – like storage rooms full of Sun thin-workstations or uselessly huge laptops that are barely deserving of the name “laptop” (and don’t have a serial port I might add, annoying for people who have to do ground-up switch configurations)

Why?  Because:

If they don’t spend it this year they won’t be able to justify requesting a budget increase next year.

If they don’t spend it they will get their hands slapped for requesting too much money this year.

(The greatest reason EVER given to me by a government employee as to why they spend money like this:  “If we don’t spend it now we won’t have it next year.”)

My brain hurts.  And as a taxpayer, this is the kind of stuff that gets me positively barking.

Spend money – it keeps the economy moving and allows people like me to keep working.

HOWEVER – spend it smartly.  Don’t throw $1.2 million dollars away on a solution when a $600K solution will do the same job with fewer moving parts.

In fact, it’s funny – when you start spending money smartly, the side effect is you can usually get more.  So instead of buying $1,200,000 worth of storage for a Data-center, you can get $1,200,000 worth of storage and fully equip both a data-center *AND* a Disaster Recovery site.

You know – actually protecting the data you’re entrusted to protect might be a neat idea…

By the way, all examples here are hypothetical…right?