Fessing up is certainly the fallback plan if I can't make something work - I'd have no problem buying an additional add-in card on my dime if I could make this work somehow. I don't mind the egg on my face (it happens), I think I'm more bummed that this shiny new hardware can't be used :)
On the plus side same client tonight went from 3Mb/down 800-ish up Internet speeds to 10Mb/10Mb so while their server will be no faster, their Internet connection speeds will be much improved. All for $20/mo less. Makes *me* happy since their to-the-cloud backups will go a gazillion times faster. Even with this small network there were a surprising amount of tweaks needed to make the cutover (exceptions for forwarding Remote Web Workplace to inside, re-architecting to eliminate 3 Linksys routers, etc). 4 hours to change ISP's? Took 2 mins to do the basic "yet I can get to Google" but another 3hr 58mins to do the rest of the tweaks... Dave From: Andrew S. Baker [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 10:50 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: What would YOU do? Fess up on the mistake to the client AND the vendor. Things happen. Talk to Dell and see if there are some options. Hopefully, you haven't opened the card yet. ASB http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker Harnessing the Advantages of Technology for the SMB market... On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 1:27 AM, David Lum <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Background: A %nightjob% client (17 employees) of mine has a Dell PowerEdge 840 with 4 SATA drives, two volumes of RAID1 (2x250GB for C: and D: , 2x500GB for E:) OS is SBS 2003 and they use SQL in addition to Exchange (when I spec'd this in 2007, SQL wasn't involved). I have split up Exchange / SQL Log/DB files as best I can. This has been working OK but they app that uses SQL is kind of a pig and it and Exchange create a lot of disk contention. I got the bright idea to have them buy $600 of 15K RPM SAS drives and an external enclosure and is bundled with a SAS RAID5 card (PCIe 4x - this is important for later...). I figured I'd create a RAID5 volume and point SQL over to this new drive array and performance should be much improved, my theory being is the system will be as fast or faster pre-SQL (my thinking was I might be able to move some other things off the SATA drives and onto the faster controller/disks). The mistake: Parts are onsite, and tonight I go to install the RAID card and....heeeeey, this system has ONE PCIe 8x slot and ONCE PCIe 1x slot, plus some standard PCI slots. Populating the PCIe 8x slot is a SAS 5/iR controller hooked to the four SATA drives. In other words, the shiny new toy I had them purchase won't work because I had assumed the existing RAID controller was built-in. It hadn't occurred to me as a remote possibility that there would be insufficient slots, I hadn't added a thing to this server since they'd bought it. What would you guys do? Send the hardware back and plead mea culpa? Is there any way to put the existing SATA array on a different card (say, a PCIe 1x SATA RAID card) without having to rebuild the volumes? I've looked for SAS RAID5 PCIe 1x (yes, it would be slower than 4x but still better than the stiff internal) but no luck. Maybe I'm over thinking this after a 17hr day (between %dayjob% and %nightjob%), but I welcome your guys' input. David Lum Systems Engineer // NWEATM Office 503.548.5229<tel:503.548.5229> // Mobile 503.267.9764<tel:503.267.9764> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
