Re: re: it's just somebody else's computer you can't control
don't pretend the cloud doesn't have any benefits to go along with the bad bits.
I think the point being made is that there really, really isn't a one-size-fits-all offering. Every use case in every organisation is different.
We know very little about this particular case, but the valid point is probably that while Google's offering was undoubtedly useful while getting the thing set up (little capital outlay, ability to scale up - or down - as required), by the time it became "mission critical" there should have been a more robust system in place, even if that merely involved stepping up a tier (or two) on the support ladder.
The problem is that sales droids are extremely good at convincing PHBs that "the cloud" is the answer to everything, without explaining that moving to a cloud-based solution, particularly where an existing on-site solution has been in place for many years, involves looking at every aspect of the operation from the roots upwards and re-evaluating which bits are "worth" what to the company.
All a PHB sees is "it's working" and "it's cheaper". Once those two things are established, best of luck.
On a much smaller scale, at home I have a NAS(*) which stores all our digital media. It's based on an E450 AMD processor and six 1TB 2.5" HDDs in Z2 (ZFS equivalent of RAID6) for approximately 4TB online.
Occasionally a disc dies and is replaced - no problem.
However, I now need to expand the array and I can't do the trick of swapping out the 1TB discs for (say) 1.5TB or 2TB discs because NAS-capable 2.5" discs simply don't come in sizes greater than 1TB(**). What's that all about? I blame SSDs. I wanted to build a small, low-power, quiet(ish) NAS and I gambled that HDD capacities would continue to rise. Well 3.5" capacities have, but 2.5" HDDs have been stuck at 1TB (except for WD Blue etc.) for about five years now.
So I need to rebuild the whole caboodle, either to support more than the 6 x 2.5" discs I currently have (i.e. a new motherboard with more SATA and/or more PCIe) or a new (bigger) case which can take 6 or more 3.5" discs. To be honest, a new m/b is a good option anyway as the existing one is well over 5 years old and I recently lost a similar E350.
In my case, the PHB is my wife, and the constraint is the bank balance. "It's working well, so why do you want to spend all that money building a new one?"
Now then, what are the current offers on HP microservers?
M.
(*)Actually there are two, physically separated, in theory replicating each other. For various reasons this isn't quite working the way I need it to at the moment...
(**)For home I'd be happy using WD Black or Barracuda Pro rather than a WD Red or Ironwolf, but even they don't come larger than 1TB.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
