@coliver said:

@RojoLoco said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Key steps to HA involve redundant generators, good fuel supply plan, high availability and very intensive HVAC solutions, that kind of stuff. Your plant is 10 fold as important as your gear.

^^^ These are the very reasons we decided to colo some systems. It was far more cost effective for us, and we got a whole 8x8 cage, so I have a table and chairs, monitor/kbd/mouse onsite. Like an office away from work.

For when you just need to "get away"?

To those lovely high 60 temperatures..

@Dashrender said:

I personally can't stand Gmail - the lack of folders frustrates me. But then again, the idea of tagging an email when it comes in - damn what a huge amount of time that will take. I have to assume though that google gives you list of pre used tags so that you aren't creating unique tags all the time - so that at least seems helpful.

I used to think the lack of folders was a bad thing. Now I think it's good. Tags are much more flexible. The problem with folders is some things fit in to multiple categories. Gmail search is way better and they had a ton of filters as well.

@scottalanmiller said:

If we were really looking at HA, the first step is facilities. How do we get the facilities to a point where they can handle HA? Do we put the servers in a datacenter? Do we upgrade the existing facility to handle HA needs? Generally on premises can't do HA without a major investment.

The cheapest path to HA is an enterprise datacenter and good, redundant ISPs, in most cases.

Show him the bill for the Liebert UPS (The NX and NXL) System like we use, HVAC and back generators and then he'll change his mind.. It's likely more than an SMB's whole IT budget.

@DustinB3403 said:

Another point I made is that if we really need HA between the host that we could simply increase our existing XenServer (which also answers several of the above questions) to support these future Virtual Servers and configure a single new Dell R720xd for fail over between the two.

This idea was declined with "I'd rather leave that server for development VM's"

So there is still some critical things that still need to be thought out.

Ask him why he wants a newer server for development stuff. You usually put your old crap for your labs.

@JaredBusch said:

I like the potentional not use a backup to get it offsite. I have not done the replication myself, but know another group that has. very little data replicating in each change.

They brought in the server locally, seeded the initial replicas, moved it to the colocation facility, and then let it catch back up.

We replicate ours every 5-10min depending on the server. So we see little traffic from this.. Most of the time.

@coliver said:

You also need to remember the time it takes to retrieve data from the internet. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

If it was really important you could get ethernet to the colo and have your internet go out of the colo instead.

We have some Colo's at Time Warner Telecom, all Level 3 backbone connections. I'm pretty happy with it.

@scottalanmiller said:

Depends. I've never seen an enterprise shop with enterprise system admins that were not more expensive than the storage guys. Close, but systems is the top payer. I've known many $200K and higher systems people. No storage people at $200K. But lots over $150K.

Cost more but can do more. I'm not saying what my pay is, but my bonus is more than my whole salary at my previous employer.

@Dashrender said:

ROFLOL - awww.. the 'it's not my fault/problem' game .. ok I gotcha.

You can't laugh about it until you've seen the massive scale. You'd need to hire lots of storage admins otherwise and it would end up costing about the same.

@scottalanmiller said:

He's in a Fortune 100, so they tend to focus on massive scale cost savings on enormous SAN and use the purchase to shift support resources to the vendor. Almost certainly they run on EMC, everyone in the Fortune 1000 does.

Yep we have EMC, Having to support something like the SAM-SD at a large scale could suck if something went wrong. We also have Dell EQL SANs for some non-production stuff, but they are old, not warrantied, Dell likely gave them to us as the sent us lots of freebies often, including the printer in my office.

@Dashrender said:

Plus you'll be ready to save you company a bundle when the time comes to replace/install a new one, unless you're that space that Scott specifically mentioned.

The SAM-SD is not something we'd be deploying here. I've deployed them before at smaller companies. We have a lot of scale here with our datacenter.

@coliver said:

Right, how would it compare to a Dell Compellant

Dell Compellant is very low end with a high price tag I believe most of them are just windows servers. EMC VNX is somewhat better but it's all flash. the VNXe is low end as well.

@scottalanmiller said:

And it did indeed crush the NetApp.

That does take much. A company we bought out has a butt load of the netapp fas2220, they all suck.

@coliver said:

HP and Supermicro are geared for SMBs? I find that hard to believe.

Yes, the SAM-SD is meant for SMB's who shouldn't really be buying SANs and are most likely considering only buying a single SAN instead of multiple.

@coliver said:

Man, the last time I did that I got calls from not only Dell, but CDW and PCConnection trying to sell me an IPoD.

Dell rarely calls us, I mean we spend tens of thousands a month with them already so that could be part of it.

@coliver said:

@Jason said:

@coliver said:

Any reason not to just do a SAM-SD and run iSCSI through a *nix distribution? It seems like that would be less expensive.

Than buying a used san? Not really I have a but load of HDDs laying around. Used SANs without the NAS features come in around the $300 mark.

Hmm, I was thinking along the lines of a used HP or Supermicro server. You can get a 24-bay server for 150-200$.

I'd rather have something more enterpise grade like I'd be using at work.. granted it will be a lower end SAN. Those are more geared to the SMB.

@hubtechagain said:

i meant without having to go through a rep.

Do you not have a dell account? If you already have an account you can just download it from that page. I can as well as upload the file for them to make the PDF report.

@hubtechagain said:

anybody have a dpack download?

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/dell-performance-analysis-collection-kit-dpack

@coliver said:

Any reason not to just do a SAM-SD and run iSCSI through a *nix distribution? It seems like that would be less expensive.

Than buying a used san? Not really I have a but load of HDDs laying around. Used SANs without the NAS features come in around the $300 mark.

I'm looking for a cheap one on eBay. Looks like may of the lowend Dell Complement ones are actually just windows servers with iSCSI initiators

What about something like the Promise vTrak M610i would that be good to connect up to vSphere 6. Also anyone know if two of these can replicate with each other?

There's also a bunch of cheap NetApp stuff but we have some of those in a company we bought out a few months ago and well our experince with them as not been great.