Well, we're using approximately 150 Gigs of storage now. When you say "virtualize" the server what do you mean? All I want to do is migrate the storage role off the file servers to a dedicated storage appliance and have a redundant SAN at a remote location. From what I read on the StoneFly website and the gentleman told me, they have that functionality built into their gear. He proposed a RAID 6 + Hot Spare, my guess is probably around 8 disks.
As for email, currently it is hosted by our internet provider, who has graciously given me control over my users on their mail server, so I typically limit them to about 20-25 megs, with the exception of a few outside sales people that are up to about 50-75 megs. When we bring email in-house, I'll probably keep those limits similar to what's on the hosted service, except that I might relax things a little to allow up to 100 megs or so. J I do want to redirect "my documents" for all my users so that it's on the network, in case their PC blows up, but with less than 100 users behind the firewall, I don't see that increasing storage by more than a couple hundred megs per user.. John-AldrichTile-Tools From: Jonathan Link [mailto:jonathan.l...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, October 09, 2009 11:37 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: NAS/SAN The transition from DAS to network storage requires a bit more planning. Left unsaid in your email is if you're also virtualizing your servers. You haven't quantified you're actually using now. IF you want 5 TB and you're using 3 TB now, 5 may not be sufficient. I would also suggest that you need to factor spindle count into your matrix. You don't want' just gobs of storage, you want to maintain throughput as well. Then, given the risks of recovering from a hard disk failure you should also carefully consider the RAID implementations (and disk size) allowed for each type of device. I ended up selecting an EqualLogic unit at 2 TB (8x250GB disks). The performance has been great, but I underestimated how much storage I would actually end up needing. I'm buying another 2 TB next year. Once you have the capability of doing snapshots and you fully virtualize your infrastructure your network storage needs rise dramatically. -Jonathan On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 10:06 AM, John Aldrich <jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com> wrote: So, we're working on getting our first big "storage appliance" here. As the IT Manager it's my job to get quotes, etc. I'm talking to all the "big boys" out there and getting a lot of good quotes. My requirements are fairly simple: 1) On the order of 5 Terabytes of storage (significantly more than we are using currently.) 2) Redundant everything (disks, controllers, network, power, etc.) That's about it. We are looking, eventually, to bring email in-house, probably using Kerio mail server as it's got the features we need at a price we can live with. The problem is that I'm getting quotes all over the place. The last quote I got was for a QNap ISCSI NAS with 6 1 Tb drives, but it doesn't have the redundancy I'm looking for (no redundant controllers.) I've gotten quotes from vendors for HP, LSI, NetApp, QNap and am working on an Equallogic quote. Anyone else I should be looking at? Our plan is to get two of these for DR/Business Continuity purposes and have one of them at a remote office, and possibly even back the remote one up to tape. J Am I being too paranoid? Not enough? Anything else I should be looking at? At first I was really wanting single-instance storage, but the LSI vendor kind of talked me out of that being a requirement. I get a report every night from the current storage detailing all duplicate files, and there aren't that many so I think I can get away with not having de-duplication/single-instance storage. Your thoughts, please? John-AldrichTile-Tools ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
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