Ah well yes.

That is true that it would be a huge step to jump to HA, but it should would be nice

I've never talked about a less available solution, a minimum solution sure.

I've always wanted HA in this environment (because I'm tired of getting that 1AM call).

And I think it's a reasonable cost, doesn't mean that upper management does. They might say "eh they can wait". In my mind though it is not something that should simply thrown off, especially since we're growing our overseas clients are asking us for more and more.

yea we don't often have earthquakes or tornado's or hurricanes here in NY. A fire is certainly a possibility; but that is what offsite backups are for.

The biggest issue here is we have people working globally, 24/7 all coming back to the main office. If this server failed for any reason all functional service would stop until it was back up and running.

Granted I think a second unit is reasonable for the cost of $10G its my boss who has to sell it.

And down the road (6 months maybe) purchase a second matching unit for HA which we really want.

That's the only way it would work in this environment. We don't have any hosted applications such as an ERP, or Virtual PBX. So it would all get moved onto a larger unit.

Which consolidates the entire company to a single VM Host which has room to grow if need be.

The trouble IMO is the price on those SSD's they seem so expensive when compared to the cost of the Host.

Scaled up the the 10 Bay Chassis, 2 X Intel Xeon E5-2660 2.2GHz/20M/1600MHz 8-Core 95W, 128GB (8x16G) DDR3 ECC RDIMM and eight Samsung 850 EVO 2 TB SSD's total price is $10742.92.

Which is probably still cheaper than what the MSP will offer as a solution.

@DustinB3403 said:

The goal is to get off of equipment that is at its EoWarranty.

While virtualizing everything server side.

And these servers have 1-2 external drives attached as backup to them already. There isn't much internal storage on these machines.

The goal is to get off of equipment that is at its EoWarranty.

The data partition could be backup via ShadowProtect.

That or I scale up the CIFS server that is being used on our small XenServer to backup the few less critical VM's I have running there to be large enough to hold 12 TB of data.

I'd probably have to build one for that purpose as well as trunk a few NIC's to get a good throughput.

Well maybe not the maximum.

There are 2 servers acting as file shares. The backup mechanism is via ShadowProtect

If I were going to propose this I would scale up the CPU and RAM to the max that the board can support as I'd also say virtualize everything onto this host. to consolidate our server footprint.

Without having to have a 4TB Snapshot sitting there, just waiting to be used.

The reason I ask is so that should something afflict the VM C partition that I have some way to recover more rapidly that our Buffalo drive.

I wonder if I could use NAUBackup to snapshot a specific partition rather than the entire VM.

True, and I'd still be using the same appliance I have, and I suppose I could have 2 partitions on the VM the "C" drive for the OS, and a "D" for data with shares under it.

So build a massive XenServer with ton's of local SSD storage and then migrate the data into the VM. Consolidating it all into a single VM.

I'd really need a much larger CIFS file server to make my backups then ..... haha

The CPU and memory were bare minimums to have from xbyte so... why not.

As for the drives they are physical file shares at the moment... so yeah....

All in, with 16GB of Memory and Dual Xeon at 1.8 GHz with 4 of the drives the price for this unit would be $4190.96

We'd then have to move all of our data over to it, remap our shares, and have our backup appliance backup a single server...

Doesn't seem horrible. But how does one move 4TB of data (from different servers) all to one server?