Are you taking a quick Qnap?

I cant believe the conversation I am having internally on and off throughout the morning.

I have a customer who has been running a peer-to-peer network (Yes they do still exist) they have Sage accounts on a PC which they all access as the drive is shared out, obviously this is a very slow and poor method compounded the other day when said machine had a hissy fit and fell over. I sold the customer a Qnap NAS the idea was that it would arrive Wednesday, the 'guys' could play with it Thursday update, RD etc then install on Friday.

None of that was done and to be honest I'm not convinced it was installed properly anyway for a start of it had the wrong time, a latest firmware update had not been applied and the backup routine had not been set up correctly either!

The poor customer rang four times yesterday and so far has rung twice today, now to put things into perspective he is a bit of wuss so is probably making the problem sound ten times worse than it actually is however he does have a problem and we need to sort it.

For me personally I think we should work on/with the Qnap I cannot believe that what in effect is a cup is unable to host a database OK I understand the database is being accessed fairly regular but at the end of the day its not doing a lot else. The slow data transfer rates could probably be resolved by updating the firmware but no!

No lets replace it with a server, Windows Home server to boot!

Me: "I'd far rather apply the firmware upgrade and take another look at the hardware than chuck a server at the problem"
Colleague: "Pete it won't work I've had this before with these NAS drives you cant keep swapping stuff backwards and forwards on them"
Me: "What? So are you saying they are a one time save only? The specs say its designed for multiple access"
Colleague: "It won't work"
Me: "So I worked hard to persuade him that the NAS is the answer to his problems, I got him to cough up money for the solution now you want me to go and tell him the solution I sold him was wrong and by the way we are going to replace that brand new Qnap with a refurbished server "
Colleague: "Its a better solution"
Me: "Possibly, I have no evidence of that we have not done anything with the Qnap"

My point is we will look incompetent enough by in effect saying "We sold you the wrong thing" but then we intend to add insult to injury by supplying a second hand machine.