In our French Overlord's IT group, it's still 1998
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@blakeyrat said:
@DaveK said:
Are you amnesiac as well? We were talking about MY former admin in MY former company and why he wasn't able to grow the storage, and it was him who you called "a lazy fucker". You appear to have completely missed the change of context in the conversation because you still think everything is all about you.No, read what I actually wrote you ignorant fool; it's not because he's lazy, he'd clearly looked into it; it's because management won't sign off on the expenditure. Where do you think the money's going to come from?
I dunno, how about wherever it came from 2 years ago before the shitty French Overlords bought us, back when our email had no quota? How about that money?
@blakeyrat said:
@DaveK said:
No, neither of you are anyone's customer, you are both EMPLOYEES of the same firm. You don't PAY your IT department for service out of your own pocket, it is a service provided by the employer to facilitate you doing your job. Sense of entitlement showing here.That's because your thinking is not based on any kind of rational process but is merely an expression of your unwarranted self-importance.
No. I'm their customer, and they're providing crappy customer service.
@blakeyrat said:
@DaveK said:
The reason why is "Because that's what your boss wants you to do, and doing things how your boss wants them done is what you get paid for". If you were a carpenter or builder of some kind, you'd be sitting here whining about "But why do I have to clean and oil my tools after I've used them? Why won't the boss just buy me new ones when these ones break?"You're the cry-baby who can't be bothered to clean out his mailbox and expects everything to be changed around to suit him.
So far I haven't gotten an answer to the simple question, "why should I have to clean out my email?" I've never had to clean out any other email account I've ever owned since, hm, about 1998 like the subject line says. Why do I have to now, in 2011? I like when IT moves forward, I do not like moving backwards.
The boss may or may not be stupid for getting you to spend your time cleaning out your mailbox rather than getting IT to throw new storage at it, but it's his call, and you're paid to implement it.
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@DaveK said:
No, neither of you are anyone's customer, you are both EMPLOYEES of the same firm. You don't PAY your IT department for service out of your own pocket, it is a service provided by the employer to facilitate you doing your job. Sense of entitlement showing here.
This is a good point, although it's not uncommon in large companies to have support departments (like IT) charge the budgets of supported departments. And if there's no explicit arrangement, it must be implicitly accounted for by management somewhere. Likely, blakeyrat's org isn't paying nearly what they'd need to pay for the type of service he's looking for.
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@DaveK said:
@blakeyrat said:
No. I'm their customer, and they're providing crappy customer service.
No, neither of you are anyone's customer, you are both EMPLOYEES of the same firm. You don't PAY your IT department for service out of your own pocket, it is a service provided by the employer to facilitate you doing your job. Sense of entitlement showing here.Actually, despite working for the same company, blakey would be an internal customer to his IT department. It's a Business 101 type of thing that separates out what you're thinking of as traditional (external) customers, and interacting with other employees/departments. Also, what boomzilla said is also true. At my last job they changed the development team into a "service department" that worked some majick on paper so that they appeared to generate income for the number crunchers by billing other departments for their services. Outside of accounting it pretty much is useless, but it does exist and is often very valid.
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@serguey123 said:
Wimp!
I lost my imaginary respect in you.
Yah, but it was quite courageous to bluff about sending the ticket.
@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:
Tell me, without giving a bullshit answer like "WTF?", why shouldn't I be able to send as many large files as I please? Still nobody's answered this question.
Resources are finite. You're starting to sound like the Sovereign Computing guy.What the...?
Is the sticking point the definition of the word "should"? Maybe you don't know what "should" means? I'm at a loss why I can't communicate this simple concept to you. I give up.
@DaveK said:
No, neither of you are anyone's customer, you are both EMPLOYEES of the same firm.
You realize we can both be employees of the same firm, and I can still be their customer, right? How are those two things mutually-exclusive?
@DaveK said:
The boss may or may not be stupid for getting you to spend your time cleaning out your mailbox rather than getting IT to throw new storage at it, but it's his call, and you're paid to implement it.
Nobody above me in the company made this decision. Hell, everybody at my company is doing their damndest to keep our company separate from the heap of shit that is the rest of the French Overlord conglom-corp... which is one reason we still have Outlook, even though we had to fight tooth and nail to keep it.
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@blakeyrat said:
which is one reason we still have Outlook, even though we had to fight tooth and nail to keep it.
I'm curious, what was the Overlord's preferred choice of e-mail client?
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@blakeyrat said:
@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:
Tell me, without giving a bullshit answer like "WTF?", why shouldn't I be able to send as many large files as I please? Still nobody's answered this question.
Resources are finite. You're starting to sound like the Sovereign Computing guy.What the...?
Is the sticking point the definition of the word "should"? Maybe you don't know what "should" means? I'm at a loss why I can't communicate this simple concept to you. I give up.
Oh, I didn't realize we were talking about fantasy world. But if we're going to go there...Why should you even bother going to work? Why should you have to pay for your groceries?
And here's a related video.
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@boomzilla said:
Oh, I didn't realize we were talking about fantasy world.
Not letting you off that easy.
What do you think "should" means? When I type "users should be able to send large attachments as much as they want", how would you rephrase that? I want to solve this communication problem for next time.
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@dohpaz42 said:
@blakeyrat said:
which is one reason we still have Outlook, even though we had to fight tooth and nail to keep it.
I'm curious, what was the Overlord's preferred choice of e-mail client?Lotus Notes.
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@blakeyrat said:
@boomzilla said:
Oh, I didn't realize we were talking about fantasy world.
Not letting you off that easy.
What do you think "should" means? When I type "users should be able to send large attachments as much as they want", how would you rephrase that? I want to solve this communication problem for next time.
I'd say that this request is fundamentally incompatible with, "and I never want to have to clean out any email messages, ever." Now, if you redefined that to say something along the lines of, "I want to be able so send X MB of email data per day/week/etc. How can IT support that?" Then you have a reasonable request. I'm not someone who knows the details of provisioning email servers, etc, so I can't answer that, but I know enough about reality to know that scarcity is a fundamental aspect of life on Earth.
Of course, there are other issues, like how fast you want emails with large attachments to be delivered. Of course, this also requires an understanding of how your corporate network functions, and how it is used aside from your big emails. Of course, going across a continent and an ocean are likely to make improvements more expensive.
Part of your never removing data from the server also brings up issues about how to deal with the growing and aging data. A solution might be to put old stuff off onto tapes, or DVDs in a jukebox setup. Do you need instant access to all of this stuff? That's going to cost a lot more.
You love to say that it's possible to solve these problems, and I agree with you, but you might not be willing to pay the costs. And there are probably more important problems to be solved than protecting you from email quotas.
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Ok; so you don't know what "should" means. Got it. Made a note.
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@blakeyrat said:
Ok; so you don't know what "should" means. Got it. Made a note.
Bullshit. Are you interested in some moral reason why you should have to delete emails or something? No, I don't think there are any. The reasons why you should have to do that are all pragmatic. You'll just have to get over it.
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@blakeyrat said:
@boomzilla said:
Maybe you've been lucky in the past, and haven't abused email.
There's no way to "abuse" email. The whole concept is ludicrous.
Tell that to our poor little postfix, he's only nine. You see, we have this 'special' technician that likes to have a deeper connection.
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@blakeyrat said:
This kind of *** is one of those false economies that still linger in companies because once upon a time, storage actually was expensive. Now it's like, fuck, just take the cost of a 1.5 TB HD out of my salary this month and leave me the fuck alone forever.
Wow, I thought I made a decent living. One of my clients just put up a new 5TB rack on their SAN (a little more than 3x what you are willing to have taken out of a months salary). The total price (including 3 years of support) was just shy of $70K [USD].
Now multiple the increase in mailbox quota by the number of users....
ps: All not current mail can (should) be moved to local PST files unless you will need to access them from off the machine..
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@TheCPUWizard said:
@blakeyrat said:
I see the CS obscenity filter has kicked in.This kind of *** is one
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@TheCPUWizard said:
...and that's just a disc cabinet. Add backup, maintenance and running costs to get an accurate figure of how much 5 TB costs. The cost for the actual spindle ($80 for a 7k2 RPM 1.5 TB consumer disk in Blakeys example) are nothing compared to the actual costs of enterprise storage.One of my clients just put up a new 5TB rack on their SAN
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@PJH said:
@TheCPUWizard said:
@blakeyrat said:
I see the CS obscenity filter has kicked in.This kind of *** is one
Got the shit but left the fuck?
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@pnieuwkamp said:
@TheCPUWizard said:
...and that's just a disc cabinet. Add backup, maintenance and running costs to get an accurate figure of how much 5 TB costs. The cost for the actual spindle ($80 for a 7k2 RPM 1.5 TB consumer disk in Blakeys example) are nothing compared to the actual costs of enterprise storage.One of my clients just put up a new 5TB rack on their SAN
You echoed my point perfectly [but the $70K for 5TB does include the costs - excluding cost of onsite/offsite backup, which is also significant], I spun up a personal NAS with 5x2TB for under $1K. People (not just Blakeyrat) really dont seem to understand how big the differential it.
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@Zemm said:
@PJH said:
@TheCPUWizard said:
@blakeyrat said:
I see the CS obscenity filter has kicked in.This kind of *** is one
Got the shit but left the fuck?
Worst night of my life.
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@TheCPUWizard said:
@pnieuwkamp said:
Other people don't understand how cheap expensive storage really is...@TheCPUWizard said:
...and that's just a disc cabinet. Add backup, maintenance and running costs to get an accurate figure of how much 5 TB costs. The cost for the actual spindle ($80 for a 7k2 RPM 1.5 TB consumer disk in Blakeys example) are nothing compared to the actual costs of enterprise storage.One of my clients just put up a new 5TB rack on their SAN
You echoed my point perfectly [but the $70K for 5TB does include the costs - excluding cost of onsite/offsite backup, which is also significant], I spun up a personal NAS with 5x2TB for under $1K. People (not just Blakeyrat) really dont seem to understand how big the differential it.
5TB for $70K works out to $14/GB. Add all of the other necessities and labor and you are up to $30/GB. So, a GMail sized mailbox of 7.5GB is worth $225. That's cheap.
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@Jaime said:
And when you start breaking that down into employee salary terms, that comes out to $5.63/hr worth of pay. So yeah, it'd be completely feasible: just reduce everybody's pay by $5.63/hr (per gig) and any company can afford a 5TB SAN. :)5TB for $70K works out to $14/GB. Add all of the other necessities and labor and you are up to $30/GB. So, a GMail sized mailbox of 7.5GB is worth $225. That's cheap.
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@Jaime said:
@TheCPUWizard said:
@pnieuwkamp said:
Other people don't understand how cheap expensive storage really is...@TheCPUWizard said:
...and that's just a disc cabinet. Add backup, maintenance and running costs to get an accurate figure of how much 5 TB costs. The cost for the actual spindle ($80 for a 7k2 RPM 1.5 TB consumer disk in Blakeys example) are nothing compared to the actual costs of enterprise storage.One of my clients just put up a new 5TB rack on their SAN
You echoed my point perfectly [but the $70K for 5TB does include the costs - excluding cost of onsite/offsite backup, which is also significant], I spun up a personal NAS with 5x2TB for under $1K. People (not just Blakeyrat) really dont seem to understand how big the differential it.
5TB for $70K works out to $14/GB. Add all of the other necessities and labor and you are up to $30/GB. So, a GMail sized mailbox of 7.5GB is worth $225. That's cheap.
You can further reduce the cost using advertising, which I'm told blakeyrat loves, so you can get as many gb as you want for free and perhaps the company will even profit.
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@Jaime said:
Other people don't understand how cheap expensive storage really is...
5TB for $70K works out to $14/GB. Add all of the other necessities and labor and you are up to $30/GB. So, a GMail sized mailbox of 7.5GB is worth $225. That's cheap.
Hey look, someone else who gets it. Thank you, person who gets it.
It's even cheaper if you put your storage on a cloud service, but I understand that isn't feasible in most companies due to legal reasons.
EDIT: You know what's funny about this thread? After I say I don't give a shit about excuses, I get 20* posts all giving excuses. It's like I'm speaking Martian or something on this board. First people don't know what the well-worn word "should" means, then people specifically post the one thing I said wouldn't change my opinion. WTF, people? I know I'm not speaking Martian. It has more gurgling noises.
All I want is to be able to keep all my mail in a single location, so when I get a client who comes back from two years ago and says, "hey can you re-send that SQL query you sent me?", I can search for it and resend it. (And yes, this does come up a lot.) The existing situation sucks because there's no search index, and if I don't know exactly what date the email was sent I won't know what .pst file to mount.
You're welcome to think that use-case is a WTF. I don't care. (Cue thousands of posts informing me that use-case is a WTF.)
ANOTHER ALMOST WHOLLY-UNRELATED EDIT: This actually reminds me of a debate I had with a coder of InkScape. I wanted to use it to plan-out a painting I was going to do on my garage door, but the maximum document size was something like 1m x 1m. I go and ask, "hey why is the maximum document size so tiny? I wanna use this to plan a mural." And they replied, "well you can just mentally convert cm to m, which should give you plenty of space, and since all the coords are floating-point you won't lose precision." And I said, "well, if the entire coordinate system is fucking arbitrary, then why the fuck is the document size limit so fucking tiny?" Why do people feel the need to artificially limit the usefulness of software? Is it stupidity? Programmers are generally considered smart, right? So how come so much software is so stupid? Mind-boggling.
*) Pedantic Dickweed Alert: better count the posts! It might not be exactly 20!
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@TheCPUWizard said:
One of my clients just put up a new 5TB rack on their SAN (a little more than 3x what you are willing to have taken out of a months salary). The total price (including 3 years of support) was just shy of $70K [USD].
Now multiple the increase in mailbox quota by the number of users....
What am I missing? 5TB, 5000 users at an extra gig each. Works out to about $4.66 per user per year, doesn't it? In what world is that not cheaper than the time-cost of organising and archiving email?
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@dohpaz42 said:
@Jaime said:
Your math is strange. The only way it comes out to $5.62 per hour is if you throw away a SAN every week. Mine last longer than that. With a three year replacement cycle, 7.5GB costs 3.6 cents per hour. The replacement you buy in three years is going to be less than 1 cent per hour.
And when you start breaking that down into employee salary terms, that comes out to $5.63/hr worth of pay. So yeah, it'd be completely feasible: just reduce everybody's pay by $5.63/hr (per gig) and any company can afford a 5TB SAN. :)5TB for $70K works out to $14/GB. Add all of the other necessities and labor and you are up to $30/GB. So, a GMail sized mailbox of 7.5GB is worth $225. That's cheap.
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@Jaime said:
@dohpaz42 said:
@Jaime said:
Your math is strange. The only way it comes out to $5.62 per hour is if you throw away a SAN every week. Mine last longer than that. With a three year replacement cycle, 7.5GB costs 3.6 cents per hour. The replacement you buy in three years is going to be less than 1 cent per hour.
And when you start breaking that down into employee salary terms, that comes out to $5.63/hr worth of pay. So yeah, it'd be completely feasible: just reduce everybody's pay by $5.63/hr (per gig) and any company can afford a 5TB SAN. :)5TB for $70K works out to $14/GB. Add all of the other necessities and labor and you are up to $30/GB. So, a GMail sized mailbox of 7.5GB is worth $225. That's cheap.
I was mostly speaking of just the upfront costs. But, this also works out for the company because after the upfront cost, they get to keep the $5.63/hr (per gig) for themselves. So, it's a win-win; if by "winning" you mean "reduce employee salaries". ;)
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@MascarponeRun said:
@TheCPUWizard said:
If your firm only has a hundred users, that's $233 per user per year for something that is 98% wasted.One of my clients just put up a new 5TB rack on their SAN (a little more than 3x what you are willing to have taken out of a months salary). The total price (including 3 years of support) was just shy of $70K [USD].
Now multiple the increase in mailbox quota by the number of users....
What am I missing? 5TB, 5000 users at an extra gig each. Works out to about $4.66 per user per year, doesn't it? In what world is that not cheaper than the time-cost of organising and archiving email?
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@DaveK said:
@MascarponeRun said:
@TheCPUWizard said:
If your firm only has a hundred users, that's $233 per user per year for something that is 98% wasted.
What am I missing? 5TB, 5000 users at an extra gig each. Works out to about $4.66 per user per year, doesn't it? In what world is that not cheaper than the time-cost of organising and archiving email?One of my clients just put up a new 5TB rack on their SAN (a little more than 3x what you are willing to have taken out of a months salary). The total price (including 3 years of support) was just shy of $70K [USD].
Now multiple the increase in mailbox quota by the number of users....
Storage space just like ram is something that you will always need more, when I first had a 2GB HD my thought was: "I'm never going to fill this, because my 200MB HD was more than enough" (I have more than 4TB today and I'm filling them fast). So, if you give them larger quotas they will eventually use them and giving them more space is cheap, so there is no rationale to set quotas so small(perhaps if you are a small business, but in blakeys case it is a fairly big company) other than "if this was enough 10 years ago, it is enough now".
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Yay! More people who get it! Cheers to getting it!
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@blakeyrat said:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245 I'd gladly pay $80 to never have to see a "out of quota" message as long as I remained at the company.
That's not even close to the right hardware to consider for the question you're asking.
My current place of employement has a rather unfavorable deal with SAN Storage, and it recently cost our cost center $87,000 to add a TB of storage to our fileserver. That includes purchase price (relatively small to the total price), installation, our share of the backup solution, DR, power, datacenter, and the like for an estimated lifespan of 5 years. I've seen prices as low as about a quarter of that with saner policies.
(To be fair, much of the increased cost is due to insanely high data retention policies, and how that affects backups, as well as an SLA on DR that's much more than we really need).
YMMV.
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@blakeyrat said:
No you didn't. You got 20 posts giving you sensible analysis of the cost-benefit implications involved in giving you what you say you want. Labelling them "excuses" is a purely pejorative rhetorical trick on your part to allow you to dismiss them unconsidered. May I remind you that you specifically asked:EDIT: You know what's funny about this thread? After I say I don't give a shit about excuses, I get 20* posts all giving excuses.
@blakeyrat said:
Serious question: what do you think the average employee's cost-per-hour is? Let's say every employee in the company spends 2 hours a year dealing with this stupidity. Do you believe that cost is less than the cost of IT increasing/removing the quota?
Or is that amnesia kicking in again? You asked a question, you got rational answers; you may not like the answers, but they are answers.@blakeyrat said:
It's like I'm speaking Martian or something on this board. First people don't know what the well-worn word "should" means, then people specifically post the one thing I said wouldn't change my opinion.
Nothing would change your opinion Blakey, it's not amenable to reason. What were you expecting? Just a bunch of sycophantic nodding and tut-tutting in sympathetic agreement? Somebody here to fix your company's IT systems? You won't accept "excuses", you aren't interested in explanations, what conceivable kind of thing could have changed your opinion? Poetry?
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@serguey123 said:
If you go to the board, and tell them you want to invest a ten-figure sum in some new hardware, they're going to ask you what the RoI on it is. When you tell them it'll save maybe a couple of hours per employee per year, what their answer is depends on the number of employees in the firm.Storage space just like ram is something that you will always need more, when I first had a 2GB HD my thought was: "I'm never going to fill this, because my 200MB HD was more than enough" (I have more than 4TB today and I'm filling them fast). So, if you give them larger quotas they will eventually use them and giving them more space is cheap, so there is no rationale to set quotas so small(perhaps if you are a small business, but in blakeys case it is a fairly big company) other than "if this was enough 10 years ago, it is enough now".
Firms have things like budgets and cash-flow, and from the financial point of view, having less storage now, getting the employees to spend a couple of hours per year tidying out their mailboxes, and expanding the storage in a few years time when it is actually mission-critical rather than just a luxury, and by which time the price of that storage can be expected to have fallen quite a lot, can easily make sense (and large savings).
Any attempt at explaining the situation based solely on the price of the USB drive you've bought in a local store and taken home and plugged into your PC is just ignoring all the things about operating in a business environment that are different from how you run your home PC. Those costs and issues are the 99% of the problem and the raw cost of a USB HD is 1%. Hence why these explanations are inadequate to understand decision-making in a business environment.
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@DaveK said:
You won't accept "excuses", you aren't interested in explanations, what conceivable kind of thing could have changed your opinion? Poetry?
Sure, give that a try.
Look, you might possibly convince me that 750 MB is a good size for a mailbox quota. You might, if you're really good, be able to convince me that it's acceptable for a company to have no quota one year, then a quota the next, even though it has fewer employees.
But when I say, "email users should be able to send as many files as they like and store as many emails as they like"? You'll never convince me. Not in a billion years. That is because I have vision, and I like to see the way things should be instead of the way they have to be in this shitty thing we call "reality". But the nice thing about people who have vision is that if enough people have the same vision, the vision becomes the reality. The world is what we make of it, and when it comes to the IT world, it's up to us in this forum to make it fucking awesome.
So stop saying no, stop being afraid of change, and go kick some ass.
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@blakeyrat said:
So stop saying no, stop being afraid of change, and go kick some ass.
In other words...
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@DaveK said:
@serguey123 said:
If you go to the board, and tell them you want to invest a ten-figure sum in some new hardware, they're going to ask you what the RoI on it is. When you tell them it'll save maybe a couple of hours per employee per year, what their answer is depends on the number of employees in the firm.Storage space just like ram is something that you will always need more, when I first had a 2GB HD my thought was: "I'm never going to fill this, because my 200MB HD was more than enough" (I have more than 4TB today and I'm filling them fast). So, if you give them larger quotas they will eventually use them and giving them more space is cheap, so there is no rationale to set quotas so small(perhaps if you are a small business, but in blakeys case it is a fairly big company) other than "if this was enough 10 years ago, it is enough now".
Firms have things like budgets and cash-flow, and from the financial point of view, having less storage now, getting the employees to spend a couple of hours per year tidying out their mailboxes, and expanding the storage in a few years time when it is actually mission-critical rather than just a luxury, and by which time the price of that storage can be expected to have fallen quite a lot, can easily make sense (and large savings).
Any attempt at explaining the situation based solely on the price of the USB drive you've bought in a local store and taken home and plugged into your PC is just ignoring all the things about operating in a business environment that are different from how you run your home PC. Those costs and issues are the 99% of the problem and the raw cost of a USB HD is 1%. Hence why these explanations are inadequate to understand decision-making in a business environment.
Look, I was making an analogy using my beloved old pc but the facts are
- Storage gets cheaper even by bussiness environment standards and it will continue to get cheaper.
- The need for storage grows so what was fine a couple of years ago, it is not today.
Of course every company should check cost/benefit before doing this but, for smaller companies some less pricey alternatives exist like cloud storage and cheaper hardware. So unless special circuntances apply most companies will benefit from this.
If you are getting raped by some contract, it is your own fault.
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@blakeyrat said:
@DaveK said:
You won't accept "excuses", you aren't interested in explanations, what conceivable kind of thing could have changed your opinion? Poetry?
Sure, give that a try.Oh Blakeyrat, oh you who rant,
oh you who suffer quotas tight,
your mail exchange has got a range
of which I think this time you're right.
More gigs are cheap, both wide and deep
and I too think the CFO should see
they're easy add and'll save a whole wad
of hours for each employee.
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@Xyro said:
@blakeyrat said:
@DaveK said:
You won't accept "excuses", you aren't interested in explanations, what conceivable kind of thing could have changed your opinion? Poetry?
Sure, give that a try.Oh Blakeyrat, oh you who rant,
oh you who suffer quotas tight,
your mail exchange has got a range
of which I think this time you're right.
More gigs are cheap, both wide and deep
and I too think the CFO should see
they're easy add and'll save a whole wad
of hours for each employee.Wow. Give this man his Interwebs...
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@DaveK said:
@blakeyrat said:
EDIT: You know what's funny about this thread? After I say I don't give a shit about excuses, I get 20* posts all giving excuses.
No you didn't. You got 20 posts giving you sensible analysis of the cost-benefit implications involved in giving you what you say you want.Excuse n. Disagreement with blakeyrat
Seriously, though. Adding hard drives only barely scratches the surface of the scenario blakeyrat asked about: Users being able to send as many big attachments as they want. I brought up a bunch of issues beyond storage. Really, the way he's phrased it, the storage issue is a never ending upgrade, of which the quoted costs are just a down payment.
The type of worker who sits at a desk and has the "problem" of maintaining an email quota is not the same as the guy on the assembly line, who has no down time while working, or else the whole floor gets screwed up. The so-called savings from simply adding storage will be completely unmeasurable. Obviously, this doesn't go any further to answering blakeyrats wish about email quotas, but it helps explain why it is the way it is, whether he admits it or not.
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@Xyro said:
@boomzilla said:
the storage issue is a never ending upgrade
Yes..?Just pointing out that the LOW LOW RATES! being quoted here are just the first step, is all. There's still a question of, "Where do you draw the line?" Also, in a few years, not only will you need additional storage, but it will be time to replace all of the old stuff. Not that it's necessarily a deal breaker for blakey's IT utopia.
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Blakey, I'd like to point out that with the time you've wasted on making yourself look an ignorant ass, you could've probably archived your entire saved email and freed up your quota storage.
To put it in business terms, the RoI of your discussion here, bitching about a problem for which you have no authority to change, versus simply addressing the current problem (you cannot possibly convince me you need access to ALL those emails at ALL times) and archiving them onto your own findings of cheap storage and tossing it in a briefcase, or using the local disk that your company also provides at no cost to you, has been nil.
You would make an awful manager.
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@Master Chief said:
While I don't necessarily agree with blakey, I don't think this is a valid argument. He didn't come here to fix it. He wasn't saying "I don't have the time to fix it." He was saying "I shouldn't have to fix it/This shouldn't be a problem for the end user."Blakey, I'd like to point out that with the time you've wasted on making yourself look an ignorant ass, you could've probably archived your entire saved email and freed up your quota storage.
To put it in business terms, the RoI of your discussion here, bitching about a problem for which you have no authority to change, versus simply addressing the current problem (you cannot possibly convince me you need access to ALL those emails at ALL times) and archiving them onto your own findings of cheap storage and tossing it in a briefcase, or using the local disk that your company also provides at no cost to you, has been nil.
You would make an awful manager.
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One other aspect is that there are legal retention *LIMITS* on how long correspondance (electronic or paper) may be retained. There is also legal exposure potential for keeping longer than required. A small quota discourages the pack rat (any relation Blakey?? <ducking>).
The idea that "an employee whould be able to send and keep as many e-mails as they want" is directly against good governance and policy. The only e-mails that should be sent are those that will improve the business, and the only ones retained should be those where the person has a *known* requirement for needing the information after it is being read.
I was at a client (for a totally unrelated project) when they were subjected to an e-mail audit. The auditors required that more than 99% of the e-mails in the various systems were purged (keeping less than 1% as having valid business reasons for continued existance).
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We have tiers, everyone gets 1 GB of space. Supervisor approval gets you 2, and getting more and more just requires authorization from higher levels. IT is happy enough to add space if needed (in fact, we could double the amount of email we have without bothering) - the limits come from Management knowing that, for most people, it's not an issue and 1 GB should be plenty. For many more, it *shouldn't* be an issue. For some, though,it is an issue and in those cases, exceptions are generally fairly painless.
Though I will often try to guide people to better solutions, I will, in the end, generally do what my customer (other business units) want, as long as someone's willing to foot the bil. I think too much of IT is focused on saying no. There's certainly needs to be some "no" going on, but I try to save saying "No" for those times it's really important. Adding some space for email... yeah, whatever, isn't a problem for me.
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@boomzilla said:
Also, in a few years, not only will you need additional storage, but it will be time to replace all of the old stuff.
The good news is that the replacements for the old stuff will be bigger, faster, and cheaper than the old stuff. I'm currently replacing Ultra-SCSI 320 stuff on 2Gb fiber with 6Gb SAS stuff on 8Gb fiber for one-fifth the cost per gigabyte. Also, I can fit 14TB in 2U instead of the 2TB per 3U the old stuff could fit.
I'd hate to work for some of you people. A typical worker's email storage space costs less than their office chair. It seems like some of you would come to the conclusion "Why should work provide you with a chair? You could work all day standing. Spoiled bastards." You throw around numbers like $75K like it's going to break the bank... you'll only need a $75K SAN for email if you have thousands of users, in which case the cost per user is low. If you only have a handful of users, then a few hundred dollars of local storage or a budget SAN will do fine, also for a modest cost per user. Another point of perspective: I spend ten hours a week on conference calls. That's 600 minutes a week or about 30 thousand minutes a year. At one cent per minute, a very low rate for a conference service, my company would spend $300 a year for me to communicate effectively. The bill is paid with a smile because that's how we get work done and it reduces travel costs. The cost of supporting blakeyrat's email nirvana pales in comparison. If your IT organization can't provide this service for a reasonable cost, then fire all of the messaging guys and pay a service provider $5 per user per month.
Another thought... I have projects that typically go on for 3 to 12 months and I keep all important conversation threads for the duration of the project (I archive them in a project-specific PST after the project closes). If my email quota were to be reduced to 100MB and auto-purging turned on at a short interval, I would have to change some of my behaviors. If you disable .PSTs, then I'll just save them in a folder as .MSG files, so I'll still need to back them up, so I would need an external hard drive (or I could back them up to my home directory, putting us back at squared one again). I'll also need some way to search them, since I could no longer use Outlook's search capability. Something like Copernic Desktop Search would do - its $60. I'll also be creating my own little IT world that will increase support costs for everyone. So, saving $200 turns out to not save any money anyways.
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@mahlerrd said:
Remember, every time IT says "No", it really means "We're not going to help you with the problem, go cobble together some awful solution with Access and Excel. See you in two years after it explodes in your face and it costs a lot of money to clean up."I think too much of IT is focused on saying no. There's certainly needs to be some "no" going on, but I try to save saying "No" for those times it's really important.
I once worked with an organization that discovered they had more data in rogue Access databases than in all of their Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server databases combined. That's what you get when you say "No" too often (or if you say "Oracle" too often)
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As with all WTFs corporate, dilbert has covered it: http://dilbert.com/fast/2002-06-08/
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@Jaime said:
I'd hate to work for some of you people. A typical worker's email storage space costs less than their office chair. It seems like some of you would come to the conclusion "Why should work provide you with a chair? You could work all day standing. Spoiled bastards."
I dunno. My brother in law got a standing desk and he loves it.
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@blakeyrat said:
Read: "Hey, why am I not allowed to go faster than (insert local max speed) MPH? I'm not interested in safety or laws, am I speaking Martian or something?"EDIT: You know what's funny about this thread? After I say I don't give a shit about excuses, I get 20* posts all giving excuses. It's like I'm speaking Martian or something on this board.
You can exclude (groups of) arguments from the discussion all you want, it just undermines your position as you're excluding the exact reasons that actually apply. But fine, I'll bite. You shouldn't be able to send infinitely large e-mails because bananas are already cuckoo.
@Jaime said:
You sit on that chair for 8 hours a day. Time spent on cleaning your mail is either negligible if you actually bother to incorporate it in your system or an hour or two a year if you keep hogging e-mail like there's no tomorrow.I'd hate to work for some of you people. A typical worker's email storage space costs less than their office chair. It seems like some of you would come to the conclusion "Why should work provide you with a chair? You could work all day standing. Spoiled bastards."
My mailbox is usually below 50 MB. Do I need more? Not really. Counting the archives as well it's 500 MB, but that's from 2008 to now and would be less if I could be bothered to clean it out a bit better, as I'm never going to need most of it anymore.
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Disk space is cheap. Given that, annoying your users/employees with arbitrary quotas (and/or forcing them to take time archive crap they may or may not need) is more of a cost to the business than just buying more disks. blakey's right on this one.
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@The_Assimilator said:
Disk space is cheap. Given that, annoying your users/employees with arbitrary quotas (and/or forcing them to take time archive crap they may or may not need) is more of a cost to the business than just buying more disks. blakey's right on this one.
Things like that are so much easier to say when it's not your money.
