Disaster Recovery and Disaster Avoidance Planning for a Small Manufacturing Firm
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@garak0410 said:
We are running production VM's on that aging (but licensed) PowerEdge 2900. Do I need replacing that as my priority or perhaps look at the Starwind solution first? We are going to need more storage since we are adopting DocuWare.
Aging servers are bad things. That's when the risk goes way, way up. Nothing wrong with utilizing old stuff, but from the sounds of it you have one things that makes tons and tons of sense (someone jump in if I'm missing something big here) and that is....
Get one "nice" "new" server that will handle your entire workload without a problem and migrate everything to that. That's job one. Everything else is secondary and we can figure out the details after that. Getting to one, new server will dramatically lower your risk and make your job easier and is probably necessary no matter what else you decide to do. So getting that done and out of the way is a discrete, and very important first step. Once you have that and good backups, you can breath easily and move from being in a critical disaster avoidance mode to casually tweaking the environment for the best long term strategy.
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I put "nice" and "new" in quotes because you definitely should not get new. Check out xByte (see their add on the right over there -----> ) and see how awesome refurb can be. That's all that we buy. Something like a nicer R510 might be all that you need. That will be very cheap. Get a warranty from xByte. So "new to you" and far better than what you have, but nothing crazy.
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Going to a single server you likely want RAID 10, but RAID 6 can do fine. But likely you won't need more than four drives if you go NL-SAS or better, so RAID 6 wouldn't be an option yet. Go high on memory, it's cheap and almost always the bottleneck.
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We will need the DPACK to know for sure, but an R510 is a monster compared to what you have and so much cheaper than the R700 series. The R510 can hold more storage than you could possibly need and is a very low cost chassis. Hard to go wrong with it. It's my favourite entry level Dell on the market. (The R720xd is my favourite mainline Dell.)
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@garak0410 said:
We are going to need more storage since we are adopting DocuWare.
Got a ballpark number on that? How much storage does your fileserver use today? How much are you anticipating from DocuWare?
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@scottalanmiller said:
I put "nice" and "new" in quotes because you definitely should not get new. Check out xByte (see their add on the right over there -----> ) and see how awesome refurb can be. That's all that we buy. Something like a nicer R510 might be all that you need. That will be very cheap. Get a warranty from xByte. So "new to you" and far better than what you have, but nothing crazy.
Checking out XByte now...good prices...would want something strong enough to run all of our VM's...then perhaps re-purpose the current T420 for the redundancy project.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@garak0410 said:
We are running production VM's on that aging (but licensed) PowerEdge 2900. Do I need replacing that as my priority or perhaps look at the Starwind solution first? We are going to need more storage since we are adopting DocuWare.
Aging servers are bad things. That's when the risk goes way, way up. Nothing wrong with utilizing old stuff, but from the sounds of it you have one things that makes tons and tons of sense (someone jump in if I'm missing something big here) and that is....
Get one "nice" "new" server that will handle your entire workload without a problem and migrate everything to that. That's job one. Everything else is secondary and we can figure out the details after that. Getting to one, new server will dramatically lower your risk and make your job easier and is probably necessary no matter what else you decide to do. So getting that done and out of the way is a discrete, and very important first step. Once you have that and good backups, you can breath easily and move from being in a critical disaster avoidance mode to casually tweaking the environment for the best long term strategy.
I completely agree.
Call the XByte guys and get a quote.
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@garak0410 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I put "nice" and "new" in quotes because you definitely should not get new. Check out xByte (see their add on the right over there -----> ) and see how awesome refurb can be. That's all that we buy. Something like a nicer R510 might be all that you need. That will be very cheap. Get a warranty from xByte. So "new to you" and far better than what you have, but nothing crazy.
Checking out XByte now...good prices...would want something strong enough to run all of our VM's...then perhaps re-purpose the current T420 for the redundancy project.
They are great, we've been working with them for a few years now. And they are quite active here. @ryan-from-xbyte @SeanExablox @Lyndsie_xByte and more are around to help out.
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I have not yet bought a server from them, but they were awesome when I needed some SSDs.
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If DocuWare isn't as critical as everything else, you might, might consider storing it's data on a NAS unit if the disk it requires (same kind as everything else in the server) would be to expensive to put in the server itself.
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@scottalanmiller said:
We will need the DPACK to know for sure, but an R510 is a monster compared to what you have and so much cheaper than the R700 series. The R510 can hold more storage than you could possibly need and is a very low cost chassis. Hard to go wrong with it. It's my favourite entry level Dell on the market. (The R720xd is my favourite mainline Dell.)
We currently are still tower servers...so will look for the equivalent for sure.
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This is the time to make the move. Seriously, even with just one server, racking is worth it IMHO. You generally get better equipment at better prices and everything is easier to deal with. Tell management that you are going to save a ton of money here and do some great stuff and part of the deal is you want a small 1/4, 1/3 or 1/2 rack and going to start upgrading stuff to more business grade as updates get made. Start with your server. You'll be very happy that you did. Doesn't have to be a cabinet, something small will do.
@JayRMS is our resident rack and cabinet expert, he can guide you and hook you up for something small for a starter rack system.
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Just get a rack mount. You can still put it on a shelf...
I just spec'd one for you.
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Note 1: That server is $5k and change. With two good procs, 64GB of RAM, and 16 terabytes of storage (in RAID10).
I picked the 4TB over a 3TB because XByte has them on sale at the moment.
Far cry from your quote and well under the $10k you mentioned.
You can drop 2 drives (for 12 TB in RAID10) and get two identical server for $10k.
Note 2: I did specify NBD parts only warranty on the assumption that you have a 2nd host being replicated to for fail over on hardware issues.
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My only question about that setup is, will it have the IOPs he needs?
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What is the storage like in the current setup?
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@Dashrender said:
My only question about that setup is, will it have the IOPs he needs?
Great question. Have the results from that DPACK been posted yet?
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@scottalanmiller @Dashrender @travisdh1
Of course it will. He is not doing anything that takes IOPS. go back and read the OP.
a DC, file server, server running Veeam, and an old SQL server that Excel spread sheets connect to.
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Just to quantify my experience, I have a client with Server 2008 R2, SQL 2008 R2, and MS Dynamics 2011 running an accounting application. it runs just fine on 7.2k NL SAS
People have this fear of SQL and think it needs 15K drives to do anything.
Most SMB do not use any application hard enough to warrant 15K or even 10k drive a lot of the time.
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@JaredBusch said:
Just to quantify my experience, I have a client with Server 2008 R2, SQL 2008 R2, and MS Dynamics 2011 running an accounting application. it runs just fine on 7.2k NL SAS
People have this fear of SQL and think it needs 15K drives to do anything.
Most SMB do not use any application hard enough to warrant 15K or even 10k drive a lot of the time.
And most of those remaining that do can more effectively fix that using more memory rather than faster storage. A little extra memory can do performance wonders for SQL Server.
