IT Employment·20,075 discussions

IT but not IT. Confused..

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Hello to all. I started my career before 17 years as a Computer soft/hard engineer in a small wholesale company. I worked for about 3 1/2 years there, and after for about 2 years in a computer store (pc building, computer repair etc).
After these 2 jobs i was out of technical Jobs for about 9 years (I worked on other jobs far away from my tech skills. Law offices for 6 years and opencart and wordpress admin ..social manager for 3 years).
On 2018 my first job called me back after 11 years.
I am responsible for the tech support of our products (computer cables, rack cabinets and accesories, fiber optic products, kvm connectivity and lot of other goods Like passive and active networking components.)
I spend most of my day , checking devices (10%), phone and mails support(5%), sales support – orders-offers (70%) secretarial support!! and lot of other jobs.
But my main job is to support and check our network infrastructure, end user machines, printers, firewalls , backup procedures etc
We installed before 3 years a meraki mx64 (with 2 lines as load balancing) , an endpoint security program (seqrite) and a synology nas with daily backup on all machines. With these 3 goods i am satisfied but i want to get more skills in order to support more my company . I want to start from something to get more skills because we have a lot of problems weekly like delays on sql server (maybe from migrations?maybe from lot of patents in our erp?). Our intranet works fine without delays but every 3-4 days we have to restart the server because of delays (database is about 20Gb)
I want to start from scratch and to get more skills for SQL , how to check for delays and problems, what programs i need to schedule and check our network for delays for example ( i use only cmd at the moment , sending icmp packets but manually)
I have the technical knowledge but i don’t know from where to start getting more skills
Thanks for your time

Topic

About those delays.

In reply to IT but not IT. Confused..

I’ll share we’ve changed all our HDDs over to SSDs now that the prices have fallen. I still see a lot of businesses stick with old HDDs and well, that’s their choice but the speed gains we’ve seen are phenomenal.

Another common finding are sluggish HDDs. Our test is dead simple. We use a tool like SPECCY to get a system report then head to the HDD SMART Values 00 and 07. If the raw value is in the thousands we replace that drive.

Thanks

In reply to About those delays.

Hello my friend . Thanks for your helpfull reply.
Till 2018 the company had an older machine with Windows 2008 and SQL 2012 (also had delays) At the end of 2018 the programmer/developer who supports our company (erp/sql) build firstly a vm machine inside the new server in order to install again the ERP/SQL Server. After one month we purchased SQL Standard 2017 and he transfered all the files from vm to physical
Our Server is an HP ML350 (Windows Server 2016 – SQL Standard 2017)
32GB Ram
3 disks SAS 300GB 10500rpm (Raid 5) and one more for spare
1 disk 1TB for simple backups
——————————————————-
The only services running are the SQL Server and our ERP. No domain controller, no file server, no web services.
We have still a workgroup instead of domain
The SQL Database is small . About 15-20GB
I checked weekly the disks and they had no errors
I downloaded Speccy and i can see that S.M.A.R.T not supported .
Should i enabled it from BIOS?
Should i install another program to check the disks instead of HP Tools?
I am familiar with windows machines but i am afraid to install programs on server machines.

10K RPM drives

In reply to Thanks

Are no match for today’s SSDs. I can’t imagine the speed increase you’d get from fairly cheap 240GB SSDs which run 40 or less bucks each. You could keep your RAID 5 that way.

Let’s hope none of these are Seagates as we see those have issues far too often.

As to why it’s not supported it’s likely because it’s on the RAID. To get SMART values you have to ask those that made that RAID hardware.

I don’t know where is the problem..regarding the delay

In reply to 10K RPM drives

Basically i can imagine the speed increase if we’ll get SSD Disks. All the disks in array are HP
I will take a look also to the array for the SMART support
The main problem is that i don’t know what causes the problem of these delays
The SAS Disks?
The ERP?
The SQL?
The programmer/developer who supports us says the he had enabled all the prodedures on SQL for clearing cache , rebuild etc the databases but the last 2 years we must restart the server every 2,3 or 4 days because of that delays. For example 8-10 seconds are a big time if we want to open a new order for a customer
There is no problem on our network because the same problem appearing also on the server without other computers connected to our network
I wonder if we add for example an nvme m.2 disk installed in a pci express card only for SQL , do you think that it will be better?

NVME vs this or that.

In reply to I don’t know where is the problem..regarding the delay

Gets all the IT I know lost in the technical weeds.

Once you get into “would it be better?” area sure, why not but here at the office we don’t do that. Any HDD that impacts productivity gets replaced. The costs have come down so we don’t do “the analysis” again. One of the nice perks of being in the C suite.

If you want to analyze why the current system takes 10 seconds or more, you get that developer in there. I wouldn’t be surprised if our old “SELECT *” line of code would turn up.

Google “Why is SELECT * bad?”

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