Does anybody work for or run a small business MSP? {GFI Max Edition}

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Does anybody work for or run a small business MSP? {GFI Max Edition}

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

I personally love Labtech and really want to go back to it.

Labtech and Kayako, are probably my two favorite products I have come across.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2013 22:38

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 10:22

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Stugazi posted:

Labtech is off the table for us. ConnectWise is a mess and antiquated. No meaninful development on that platform in years. I think the Labtech acquisition is sucking up their resources.

I know a lot of our local competition is on Continuum now. It amazes me that Continuum is lacking in so many areas yet seem to be killing it in the RMM space. That's a good indication of the missed opportunities by NAble, Kaseya et al. If the competition had decent packaging and communication they could kill Continuum head to head. Instead they are mismanaged and/or priced like they poo poo gold so Continuum wins by being the least insane choice.

We gave Kaseya every opporutnity to play ball. They'd rather suck their partners dry through high fees than be reasonable and win a new client (actually, a returning client, we'd already paid Kaseya ~50k in fees years ago).

gently caress Kaseya, I work with that PoS product daily. It might be that it is because we have the "cloud edition" but holy poo poo does it like to crash your browser.

I really liked labtech has it gone to poo poo affter connectwise bought it?

# ¿ Dec 9, 2013 01:28

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Stugazi posted:

Anyone find an SMB friendly SAN? We've done a few here and there but for SMB budgets it's hard to make it all pencil yet it's so important.

Not interested in Netgear, Synology or QNAP as business class solutions.

Curious what others have done.

What price range are you looking for?

HP's P2000(MSA's) and Dells MD3200's are relatively cheap and aimed at SMB, the Dells can do SSD caching where as HP can not.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2014 23:01

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Stugazi posted:

We are looking at the MD3200 from Dell. Problem is once I configure it the way it *should* be it's over budget.

I don't know what you're trying to hit then, I'd really need to understand the budget or environment you are supporting. Also raid levels are important, 4 15k 146GB disks RAID 10 are fast, leverage the data's cost.

quote:

We won a new client that already has an MD3200 so we're getting some experience on it. Seems OK but it's impossible to get our Dell team to call us back to ask important questions, like can we have two drive pools for fast and slow storage etc? Any ideas?

If you do SSD tiering the Write/Read hit will be taken by the SSD pool then sent to disk, so performance will be dependent. Some vendors are keen on doing a 75/25 split 75% of cache is reads 25% writes completely depends on vendor though.

Also are you buying direct or going through a re-seller? If a small show check CDW's pricing they sometimes and outweigh dell direct, as they can buy in a larger discount; or tell dell you're looking into "competitor and they offer some stuff can we get something competitive?"

# ¿ Feb 1, 2014 08:17

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

incoherent posted:

Wouldn't 2012 R2 jbods/storage spaces/SDD+Raid shelf and use powershell to force specific loads to the SSD be an option? It may exotic-y and out of the scope of an MSP project though.

It can, or just by an adaptec controller which will RAID 1 or RAID 10 SSD's and front end I/O.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2014 06:40

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Stugazi posted:

Dell's affordable MD3xxx series iSCSI SAN can now mix and match storage pools (SSD and 10k) so we are looking at that as an option.

It's half the price of an EMC VNXE.

For SMB I think it's acceptable.

I hope so, as we have a PO for one now.

Nice those are good boxes, just make sure you load the latest firmware on those things before you start loading data on it.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2014 06:54

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Stugazi posted:

Dilbert, how do you spec your storage? Not completely practical for us to run iometer on a dozen servers to get iops info. Slightly concerned about this dell box serving storage to that many VMs.

Usually I spec out what the environment is using currently, you an find this out with Dell's DPACK, VMware's capacity planner, or custom windows perfmon graphs. I'm generally more interested in the IOPS the server is using rather than determining Disk GB usage, granted you need to play for GB and growth usage but you'll mostly run out of IOPS before or when you hit your GB limit. Additionally you can also check the old array and see what kind of IOPS the box is reporting, and then it is determining based on things like latency, queues, and other metrics to determine how heavy I am hitting that IOP thresholds, then what the RAID penalty is. http://theithollow.com/2012/03/understanding-raid-penalty/

Generally you don't want to put everything in a large raid set, not only for rebuild times but for data access larger spanned raid sets can have worse performance on data

quote:

Box will have 9 900gb 10k drives.

Not bad, but realize larger spindle drives have seek time to read and write data.

Generally speaking there is a common way of doing things, but again it completely depends on the use case and the data it is hosting.

Fileservers/Exchange mailboxes/archival data - NL-SAS or SATA, usually in RAID 5 or RAID 6, writes take a penalty but reads don't.
SQL/SERVER BOOT DRIVE/Front end server - 10-15k RAID 10, gives me some nice redundancy with good R/W performance as needed.

Of course in SMB clients I see usually people just do everything RAID 10 which, isn't the best because loss of 2 drives in a single logical volume trashes the volume. Alternatively, people will often raid 6 everything then wonder why writing data is so slow.

How many VM's are you loading it up with? What are their functions? Are you going NFS or ISCSI?

Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Mar 12, 2014

# ¿ Mar 12, 2014 03:17

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Stugazi posted:

Thanks for the info! I'll have the guys run Dell DPACK. I didn't know that existed. It's free right?

It's free you just gotta talk to a dell rep; push for a luncheon(they will totally do it) they will do it if you bring up MD3600's, EQL's, and definitely compellent.

quote:

The Servers are a mix of lightly loaded Windows Servers, a couple of Cisco Unified Communications boxes for Business Edition 6000 voice and 2 Linux boxes. No Exchange or SQL today but they are planning a SQL and ERP box soon.

UCS should be able to give you a break down of local datastores and some network IO. SQL and ERP I'd segment an own pool or RAID 10 for, maybe store some OS VMDKS since this will be small I/O yet high IOPS.

quote:

We'll go iSCSI. I like the flexibility of NFS but since it's not a NetApp iSCSI seems like the best choice. My knowledge is a bit dated on SANs so maybe that's no longer relevant?

Iscsi is good but watch out for LUNA locking; you might find it better to go via the OS stack of NFS if you are heavily hitting that ERP/SQL system depending how you divide the controller and storage pools up. Nettapp also does NFS well, don't forget jumbo frames.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2014 16:39

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Richard Noggin posted:

I know this is a day late and a dollar short, but I'd be interested to see the quote comparison - PM me if you're willing to share.

You'll see the VNXe be about 3-5k more than a MD3xxxx, then support/installation tack on about 10k

# ¿ May 1, 2014 00:37

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Richard Noggin posted:

See that's what I don't believe. Having sold both (we're a Dell and EMC partner), the numbers don't make sense.

What's your partner level and are you selling to state/local gov?

# ¿ May 1, 2014 14:38

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Richard Noggin posted:

For fun, I just priced out a md3220i and a VNXe3150. I kept apples and apples wherever possible - 300GB 10K SAS disks (24 for the Dell, 25 for the EMC - both their max). The EMC came out $600 above, yet has a lot more features (block, file and CIFS/SMB vs just block for the md, 8GB RAM in each controller vs 4, the ability to add I/O modules, a much better interface - the list goes on and on).

If you're selling state/local gov most all the storage vendors will meet X quota.

# ¿ May 2, 2014 00:21

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Jesus Stick posted:

You're saying use the two DCs across all my clients?

there are a few different ways going about domain's to customers who can't afford it. The real problem is the headache and time used during a customer leaving. Unless you're willing to spend the time and money on the off boarding it isn't always fruitful.

how small are we talking?

# ¿ May 15, 2014 00:21

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 10:22

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Jesus Stick posted:

HP MicroServer
Windows Server Essentials 2012

Ha I was actually about to suggest this, the micro server or Dells T20's are perfect for this.

I doubt a <12 person company is going to swallow a 2000 dollar deal right off the bat, it may be more beneficial to you and your company to do leasing of domain services to companies.

E.G. Lease for 12/months, show the value in a domain then present a full implementation cost of XXXX. Say if you do 75 a month+O365 for "hosted services", you're getting a base of 900/yr + time saved on your the company. I assume you have a minimum bill time, but you can also show the company the value in the time reduction it takes with a leased server. Not only that but a central backup location is a life saver.

# ¿ May 15, 2014 19:34

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Does anybody work for or run a small business MSP? {GFI Max Edition}