I have not measured our file I/O, I don't even know how to do that. If you can point me towards some tools I'll do so. Current storage on our two servers is about 1/2 terabyte each, with about half that full. Currently our only backup is to mirror the two servers (domain controllers, etc.) I do not believe that we have sufficient storage to migrate critical folders from everyone's desktops to the server, and we are not hosting email in-house. We have about 85-90 users, and knowing how no one likes to delete email (particularly sales folks) I expect that we will need more storage. According to our ISP's server, we're using about 600 megs. I know some of our sales reps have complained because I limit their mail store to about 50-60 megs. I could probably limit it to 100 megs and they'd complain. :-) As to the number of "heavy duty" vs Light Duty, I'd guess somewhere around 20-30 "heavy" users (mostly sales folks) and the other 2/3 are probably 20-30 emails per day users. I want to get the storage role off our domain controllers, and possibly use the hardware to run VMWare and convert the DCs to virtual servers as well as running our third "server" machine (Windows 2000 Server hosting our Time and Attendance software) as a virtual machine as well. According to the work load, the current DCs (Poweredge 2900 machines with dual quad-core Xeons) are just loafing and I'd like to put them to better use. That being said, I can't really do anything with them until such time as I have somewhere to put the disk images, etc. Email will most likely be Kerio Connect due to the cost constraints and needed feature sets. Per Kerio, putting the email store on a SAN *is* supported. I figure I should have about 5 Terabytes useable storage to do what I want, as well as leave room for growth, snapshots, etc.
From: Jeff Steward [mailto:jstew...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 10:48 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN question I'm bored, I'll bite. Like others here, I'm not convinced you even need a SAN or even NAS. You can probably make use of DAS. To even begin to make an attempt to give you more guidance we need: How many users will be hitting the file server. What type of file i/o are we talking about? Have you benchmarked your current performance? How much storage do you currently have and how much do you think you will need to meet anticipated growth over the next 24 to 36 months. If you move to providing in-house Exchange, how many users will you be hosting? How many are heavy duty users versus light duty? That's a start, answers to those questions will help us help you further. -Jeff Steward On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 10:16 AM, John Aldrich <jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com> wrote: Ok, guys. I'm trying to narrow down my many choices with regards to our on-going search for a SAN manufacturer. I'd like your thoughts on the whole question of adding more intelligence vs just adding more disks. i.e. the EQ vs LeftHand models. I can see arguments to be made for both models. I'll tell you that, initially, the SAN is going to be a glorified file server, however, we plan on hosting our email data store on the SAN when we bring email in-house later on. I've already verified with the email vendor that I hope to use that this is not a problem, so that's a non-issue. Other than that, the only database we would store on the SAN would possibly be the database from our Vipre install, although initially that would stay on the local storage. So, I'd like to see some discussions of the benefits of just adding a tray of "dumb drives" or adding a complete controller along with the drives (a la LeftHand.) I just don't know enough about the benefits of each model to know what would work best for us. I'm hoping that you guys who are more experienced would give me the benefit of your knowledge. Thanks, John Aldrich IT Manager, Blueridge Carpet 706-276-2001, Ext. 2233 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
