Rick’s Rants and Raves

(Or, “Making the easy stuff hard.”)

Many aspects of my job are frustrating to me. In fact, one of my “catch phrases” is to say with a tone of exasperation “I love this place.”

Recently I asked my boss if we could get 100GB of disk space for our team to use for application log and documentation storage. When the server team told us it would be $30/GB to get space on the enterprise storage array I was a little shocked, but my boss said “Do it. We have the money in our budget.” Okey dokey.

I created the request, using the proper form. I gave them all the information they asked for. I gave them our department number and the approving director’s name. The server team member then gave me the third degree on why I needed 100GB of space. I gave him the same reasons I gave my director, and I asked why he cared if my director agreed to pay for it. He continued to resist, and find reasons to not give us the space. Finally he just said “We don’t have the space.”

A month later, my boss escalates. The server team director says “You want 100GB? Sure, that will be $3000.” When we provide him the information, he comes back with “Oh, sorry we don’t have 100GB to spare. You really should go fill out an ‘assessment’ form to initiate getting that much space.” For 100GB? For real?

I asked my director if we could buy a 320 GB external hard drive for $80. (perhaps two would be in order for redundancy…). He didn’t reply.

Today, my director goes to the Vice President over the server and storage teams. The VP explains that the enterprise storage array that we bought less than a year ago, and has a total of 65 tera bytes, is full. However, we could work with someone else in his organization who might be able to help us. My director asked if we should just buy an external hard drive. “Oh, no, you don’t need to do that.”

So here we are, willing to spend enough to buy 2.5 TB of RAID 0 drive space, and we can’t get a tiny slice of that. In a month, I’ll hit my director with the 320GB drive deal again… and hope…