[Info-vax] One wonders why people bet their companies on Microsoft based products...

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Paul.Raulerson wrote:
> <amusement> Physically move the drive from a PC to a SAN?  Must be a tiny
> little SAN. That would not work with say, my Shark, which requires drives to
> be installed in 8 packs. :) 
> 
> -Paul
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com [mailto:info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com] On
>> Behalf Of JF Mezei
>> Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 4:49 PM
>> To: info-vax at rbnsn.com
>> Subject: Re: [Info-vax] One wonders why people bet their companies on
>> Microsoft based products...
>>
>> BillPedersen wrote:
>>
>>> When you have a potential "bet your company" event planned your first
>>> action should be to audit the environment first - including backups,
>>> as well as disaster recovery plans.
>> A former ISP of mine recently moved their mail store from their PC to a
>> SAN solution. The guy doing it has a windows upbringing, not an
>> enterprise one. (and the mail server is probably still a Windows box).
>>
>> So, he just closed the mail service, and started to copy the data from
>> one machine to the new SAN system. Oops! he then realised it would take
>> something like 12 to 18 hours (can't remember the exact number). He had
>> not considered doing a test run before on the live system to measure
>> how
>> long the copy would take. Had he done that, he may have started to
>> ponder alternatives such as physically moving the drives to the SAN
>> system and serving it from the SAN system to reduce downtime and build
>> the new raid-5 (or whatever) as a mirror of the old disk so that he
>> could continue to provide read-write service to the mail server while
>> the raid-5 array was being built.
>>
>> I've see that "windows" mentality in many places. Allowing a service
>> call on a server in the middle of the day, not thinking of the fact
>> that
>> such a service call yp add a new tape drive might not actually work.
>> (in
>> the end, it had taken that company over 2 weeks and many visits to get
>> it working, not the 10 minutes that the manager had believed it would
>> take). This was not for a windows machine, it was an old Data General
>> one. So it isn't so much about "windows" per say, but rather the
>> mentality around windows such as "a reboot will fix everything" or "it
>> only takes 20 minutes to re-install windows so it is quicker to do that
>> than to find and fix the problem".
>>

Only ten minutes?  To install Windows?  If that were all it would be 
great.  But you also must download and install the latest "service pack" 
and all the patches that have not yet been incorporated in the "service 
pack".  Depending on the age of the most recent service pack you may 
also have to download and install a dozen or more patches.

Microsoft obviously believes in patching quality in rather than writing 
high quality code in the first place.