Diary of a Wolfeman

We took on a new client recently, and it seems there is going to be more work than I initially counted on: I’m going to have to break some seriously bad habits.

Their former IT Admin was one of those guys that has a stupidly superior-to-thou attitude, and this went a long way towards getting him axed.The other thing that lead to this was his inability to use a simple answer to anything – everything in their system has been over-engineered, but with substandard parts. The workstations? All Vista 64-bit, but he home-built the boxen instead of buying something with a full warranty from HP or that other place. Bleah.

Since it is a large company, the Chairman has asked the husband of one of the office gals (who heads IT for some other company) to lend a hand until they’re positive things are running smoothly. This is cool by us, because he will be handling one side of the business that we didn’t really want, so all is supposedly well.

Until I look into the backup procedure.

They guy that got the axe is using a batch file to run an NTBackup routine to an external hard drive. This is for an organization that has nearly filled 3TB of data, and has some 180GB (!) of email data. And of course, the email isn’t being backed up.

So I put together a proposal, comes out to about $3k or so – a DroboPro with a pair of 2TB drives and BEX. Helper-Guy comes back and says how he has been talking with the Director, and they want to get a solution from ‘Rhymes-with-Hell’ that has BEX built-in. I do some research, and while there is no price listed for the whole solution, the individual parts list out for about $6k. I explain that this solution will also take up 5U of rackspace and is serious overkill when we have processor time lying around unused in the 7 existing servers.

He thinks about this for a couple hours, then comes back with how he doesn’t like the DroboPro, he wants to go with a NAS device R-W-H has on offer. This of course forces me to regale him with tales of how crappy that kinda hardware is, and how I will Never (that’s “Never” with a Capital-N) recommend anything that company sells. Never.

Honestly. You’re paying my company $6k a month to manage 40-some-odd users and the attendant hardware – for fuck’s sake, listen to my advice!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.