Did I mention that I hate Windows Server 2008?
One of the many servers we have is a license server for the CAD software. If it decides not to work, none of the cad stations work. This equates to a loss north of $5k an hour. Yesterday afternoon, it started having "issues". By end of bidness today, it decided to quit. Fortunately, one of my outsource IT guys was on site. Regardless, it took both of us doing the black box troubleshooting method to finally get it fixed. Outsource IT guy was losing steam and making noises like he wanted to quit and come back tomorrow.
I 'splained to him that at 8am tomorrow nobody would be able to work and the company would be losing 5 to 6k an hour. Amazing how far up his eyebrows went. A little after 10pm, we figured out that winders server 2008 had puked out it's permissions on a shared folder and thus was denying access from all the workstations.
The challenge for us was that neither of us had set this server up. The former fired with cause IT prick did.
I think we'll get all the crap he kludged together on our network straightened out right around $100k in outsource IT billing. Where computers and business are concerned, you come to a point very quickly where it is less expensive to just buy a new computer rather than continuing to try to fix it. That point comes quickly for a workstation. For servers that are the life blood of a company, you just don't stop fixing it until it's fixed. Because come tomorrow, we have to work.
Did I mention that I hate Windows Server 2008?
[posted from my linux Ubuntu 11.04 laptop]
I understand your frustration.
ReplyDeleteI don't play with hardware here but our team has built a highly virtualized environment. It allows them to easily Plop down an image of the problem server and be back and running. Now if one of the host server fails everything slows down until that core is replaced.
Coincidentally, the server in question was virtual. Unfortunately, no successful backup image was available. That's another boring techie story though.
ReplyDeleteMy IT guys would like to convert everything to virtual servers and cram as much into to a physical box as it can handle. You bring up the precise point of why I'm reticent to do this. Having all eggs in one basket is not a good idea in my estimation.
So far we have not had any problem. Although we have god know how many physical hosts for the virtual environment. 20 may be a good start.
ReplyDeleteWe have no more available power in the server room so the only way to grow is virtual.