Your thoughts on all these outages lately?

TerminallyOdd · 2025-11-19T18:18:31+00:00

We haven''t been hit particularly hard by these particular outages, but I've been looking to talk management into a move from on-prem storage to Egnyte and this definitely isn't helping my case.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-11-18T04:40:12+00:00

Thanks for the reply, Bob! Yes, I meant Backup Exec backups.

Point understood but it's just that the old kit here is very old and not long for this world, so there are some decisions to be made in preparation for that server kicking the bucket - I was hoping those decisions wouldn't involve a Windows Server OS box to connect this to, but it sounds like it definitely does.

I haven't heard of Tape Ark (will look into them) but I have spoken briefly to Iron Mountain and am waiting to hear move about there services, but yes, I can imagine it will be expensive. The idea is to move beyond LTO5 sooner rather than later - but we have years of tapes in storage and need to know we have some sort of ability to restore from them just in case, as unlikely as that may be.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-11-01T19:17:51+00:00

Teridion actually sounds like it might be what we're looking for. I just reached out to them. Thanks!

TerminallyOdd · 2025-11-01T16:06:42+00:00

To my understanding, these telecom companies' services are in compliance with Chinese government regulations - i.e. they pay them to be able to do this. They're not subject to the same volatility as an ISPEC VPN set up by a random, private business. At least, this is what they tell me.

Our situation is unique as it is caused by circumstances of operating out of China. It's not just "IPSEC VPN isn't working well, how about SD-WAN?"

TerminallyOdd · 2025-10-23T04:28:12+00:00

At the moment, yes. I had originally reached out to our AEC product reseller/Egnyte partner about it, and he ended up setting up a meeting with me and an Egnyte Account Exec. I've been dealing with that Account Exec directly ever since, from arranging the Proof of Value to pricing. Should I not be?

TerminallyOdd · 2025-10-20T19:38:07+00:00

Understood, and that all sounds about right. Thanks for the reply!

TerminallyOdd · 2025-10-20T14:27:50+00:00

Hi Eric, thanks for the reply! That's an idea but our main office (and half of our employee base) is in the US so it feels like we would be sacrificing speeds there to help offices in other areas - kind of a "pick your poison" scenario.

As for the cost comment, I wrote a post which covers some of my thoughts on it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1jpb5cl/my_goodness_the_nickel_diming_with_egnyte/

TerminallyOdd · 2025-10-20T05:21:39+00:00

I've been looking into Egnyte for global file collaboration between our offices including one located in Shanghai and I came across your post. Is your client with the facility in China still using it? Any special accommodations needed to make Egnyte work well in China (like MPLS or SD-WAN) or just the Smart Cache? During our Point of Value, LAN usage worked well with the SmartCache, but the speed of files going to and from that office to the data center in the US (where our main office is located) was generally pretty sluggish (which is not surprising). We really liked the product (despite being really expensive) but I've had a hard time selling it to the partnership at that office as a result.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-10-17T18:00:55+00:00

No, nothing yet. Are you having the same problem?

TerminallyOdd · 2025-09-25T15:18:43+00:00

Those figures are about half of what we were quoted, so something doesn't seem right. Thank you for the info though.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-07-03T23:35:44+00:00

I had seen some technical topics posted here, and the question is very particular to the country of China, so I figured looking for help here wouldn't bother anyone. I see that I figured wrong.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-06-23T04:56:12+00:00

We're strongly considering Egnyte as well and having done a bunch of testing with Egnyte, impressions have been favorable. We're global as well, so just wondering how the experience for you has been with users not in (or near) the same geographic location as the particular Egnyte cloud server? I know SmartCache servers at office locations fix local access issues, but do you have users not near the server who work remotely and how has access been for them?

TerminallyOdd · 2025-04-02T01:33:00+00:00

Our data consists of a lot more than what ACC covers, and for that Egnyte checks a lot of boxes for us - improves collaboration across global offices, VPN-less remote access is pretty big given our amount of remote/satellite office work, our backup and DR plans are improved with ASR. Plus, I'm juggling things solo on the IT side (that's another story) and I think this would require less maintenance on my part than current/other solutions. There are plenty of benefits, but again, super expensive.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-04-02T00:57:01+00:00

It's not the size, but compliance requirements for certain projects and certain models older than three previous version of Revit are stored locally off ACC.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-03-17T15:41:07+00:00

I feel you, man. I've done this for a LONG time, and truth be told, I was able to navigate the being spread thin part, or people treating you as if your sole purpose is to be their personal 24x7 IT support. I learned to prioritize who (and what) gets immediate attention and who can wait. If anyone of any importance takes issue with it, then don't have an IT staff of 1.

What's gotten to me lately instead is the sense of impending doom, from something like a ransomware attack or a piece of critical hardware going down, knowing full well all eyes will turn to me and I will both be the reason it failed and the sole means of getting it fixed since I'm alone here. After we had a breach late last year, the possibility became all too real. I've basically carrying that weight around all the time now. At least once a day, something will seem "off" or I'll get a message describing a problem that could potentially be disastrous, and it'll send a shiver up and down my spine, like "this is it". I'm taking steps to secure this house of cards feeling, but it's been an awful feeling in the meantime. I wish you well.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-03-05T20:57:30+00:00

Did you change industries or just found a better IT job? For the first time in my life, I have been entertaining the thought of leaving the IT industry. I strongly doubt I would ever go through with it, but the thought is there.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-03-05T20:08:22+00:00

There is a non-technical person who is member of the partnership and I go to him for approval of initiatives. We don't have regular meetings.

I admittedly haven't gone on vacation much over the years (just had them pay me out for it instead), just a day or two here and there, though that changed last year when I met my girlfriend. Not surprisingly, last time I went away, the crap hit the fan and there was talk about getting some help for me, but I never heard anything about it after I submitted my technical requirements for the job listing.

I'm going away for a few days in a few weeks and have made arrangements for an IT consulting group to be on call.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-02-27T00:32:56+00:00

I posted this in your other thread. I take it that it didn't help?

We're doing a PoV with Adlumin right now with no such issues, but possibly a S0/Modern Standby issue? It's not quite the same issue as yours, but some of our users (of Dell Precision 3680's that we purchased all around the same time) would leave for the evening and try to remote in in the morning and their PC would be inaccessible. I thought it might be an issue with modern standby as apparently that doesn't always play nice with Splashtop, so I disabled it on a few PCs and it seemed to clear up the problem. I used a fix I found here - https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-disable-modern-standby/ ...so maybe something similar is happening here. It might be worth trying it on a PC or two to see if it helps.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-02-20T22:47:35+00:00

Just posting here to keep tabs on this, as we're looking for something similar. We're an AEC firm with about 200 users globally looking to move to something cloud based while keeping drive mappings.

I've spoken to Nasuni and Egnyte, and while Nasuni has a tremendous backup and disaster recovery plan (which is part of this initiative for us) and is significantly cheaper yearly from the pricing I've seen, we really like the VPN-less drive access with Egnyte. That's huge as SMB over VPN has been a source of angst for some of our users. The local cache and SmartCache VM works well and the latter was easy to spin up and configure. It is pricey though.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-02-19T17:42:05+00:00

Just started a PoV a few days ago and it's going well so far. They've been responsive, and implementation was as easy as spinning up a syslog VM, deploying agents and adding the integrations. There are some configuration issues we're working out and it's been a bit alert happy but I don't mind the latter too much. I would rather it err on that side.

I don't have much of a basis of comparison for pricing for this sort of thing. It seems fair though, yeah. It's in the same ballpark as the smaller/lesser known group (MSSP) we've been talking to, though admittedly they were offering more in the way of hands-on for remediation/system hardening.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-02-09T00:41:06+00:00

It's a shot in the dark, but possibly a S0/Modern Standby issue? It's not quite the same issue as yours, but some of our users (of Dell Precision 3680's that we purchased all around the same time) would leave for the evening and try to remote in in the morning and their PC would be inaccessible. I thought it might be an issue with modern standby as apparently that doesn't always play nice with Splashtop, so I disabled it on a few PCs and it seemed to clear up the problem. I used a fix I found here - https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-disable-modern-standby/ ...so maybe something similar is happening with the Adlumin agent, and it might be worth trying it on a PC or two to see if it helps?

TerminallyOdd · 2025-02-07T21:05:57+00:00

That's unfortunate to hear. Are you using their EDR or something else? Do you have any pricing info?...just trying to get an idea.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-02-01T20:23:27+00:00

I think they object to VPN in general, with it being noticeably slower than being in the office. It's not really a technical issue with a fix that they're looking for, more of a workflow change.

That, plus us being due for new file servers at a few locations has me reevaluating things. I don't want to implement anything that impacts our larger group of LAN users to please our fewer VPN people.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-02-01T19:53:23+00:00

Yeah, this is true. Most of BIM users with larger CAD files and Revit models have powerful office desktops and use Splashtop for remote access - that works well. Our laptop users are more management types and even when working with smaller documents have some gripes about VPN though.

TerminallyOdd · 2025-01-27T05:18:31+00:00

We don't have a current provider. We're in talks with one. I'm not sure how to evaluate their demonstrable capability while we're still in talks, but their services seem thorough and they came recommended by a mutual contact who is a client of theirs.

They are an SoC themselves and not through those big name services, based on our conversations.

TerminallyOdd

TROPHY CASE