In the interim: a) talk to management about various scenarios. Have some facts to back up the scenarios in case they question the likelihood of it happening (e.g. how many laptop/workstations have you lost - either the whole thing, or just the disk drive). Ask them how they feel if the CEO's laptop died. Or if no one could logon. Or the sales people couldn't VPN back in again for 24 hours / 48 hours / 72 hours. Or whatever. Get a feel for their priorities. And how quickly something becomes a priority the longer the service isn't available (this will help you draft some SLAs/OLAs - basically agreements on how much a service should be up). b) as a follow up to (a) - if they voice any real worry about a particular scenario, inform them that they are *not* covered for such scenario at the moment (or partially covered, or fully covered). That may focus their minds on the need to do something about it sooner rather than later.
Cheers Ken -----Original Message----- From: John Aldrich [mailto:jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com] Sent: Friday, 24 September 2010 11:50 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN question Thanks for your honest opinion, Ken. I have come to the conclusion that you and others are right. I'm going to paraphrase... I know what I know, but I don't know what I don't know and there are too many unknowns right now. I think I'm going to shelve this project for now and work on a backup/recovery solution while working on getting management to cough up the money for a consultant to help me figure out what I need. -----Original Message----- From: Ken Schaefer [mailto:k...@adopenstatic.com] Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 11:39 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN question I think this thread (like all the previous ones) has gone on long enough. We are not asking you questions because we want answers. Frankly, I think most of the people here no longer care - you've used enough time as it is. *You* need to work out what your *requirements* are. Not what you're 'unhappy' about. Or what you 'think' you need. You need to find out what the business needs, in order of priority. For example you state that you need to be back up and running within 3 days. OK - a SAN is not going to help with that. Only a *recovery* system can help with that. That means some way of replacing your tape drive (if you are worried that you'll lose that), and a way of getting your tapes back, and a way of restoring. All within 3 days. That's called your RTO: Recovery Time Objective. The next thing to consider is your RPO - Recovery Point Objective. How much data can you afford to lose? One day? Two days? A week? Again *you* need to figure this out. And again, a SAN will not help you with that. The only thing a SAN is going to do is help you avoid a recovery scenario. But you haven't stated *any* requirement whatsoever about this. Is the business happy to pay $30k to ensure that they only have a disaster once every 10 years? Or would they prefer to suffer a disaster once every 5 years, but by spending $30k on a tape library, they can be up and running again in 3 days? This is what *you* need to find out. Then you can work out what you need to buy. It doesn't matter how big or small your environment is you need requirements. My environment is going to be ~4000 Wintel servers in Production alone, I suspect yours will be smaller unless the carpet business significantly picks up. Our requirements from the customer and internally run to many hundreds of pages - probably over a thousand pages now. Even my home network (where I have about 10 VM servers) has requirements. Otherwise, you are just going to be either (a) bothering people with questions forever or (b) p*ssing money up a wall on stuff you don't need. If you want help documenting what you need, then please ask for help on that. Please stop asking for advice on SAN vendors until you've worked out what your requirements are, and you think you've found a good fit and what other people's experience with that particular piece of kit. Cheers Ken -----Original Message----- From: John Aldrich [mailto:jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com] Sent: Friday, 24 September 2010 11:26 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN question We are running DFSR, but only for redundancy. All clients map to a physical machine and drive, as we had some issues with DFSR not staying synchronous, even over a GigE connection. This was mainly due to running out of room on the disk for replication (due to multiple copies of large files being stored --- since corrected.) -----Original Message----- From: greg.swe...@actsconsulting.net [mailto:greg.swe...@actsconsulting.net] Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 11:06 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN question Also do you use DFS? If you do, NAS units don't work. The volumes must be mapped to Windows servers as local drives (meaning ISCSI or DAS) HECK, running two servers with appropriate DAS running DFS/Replication would give you redundancy.. There are tons of ways to slice this without going to a SAN and spending that money unless your REQUIREMENTS dictate specific features that only SANS require. You can get two cheap Drobo or Synology boxes that support AD, SMB, CIFS, ISCSI (mini sans basically) 3 to 5 TB depending on raid and size of drives for 1/3rd the cost of a SAN. Synology and Drobo do replication between each other, you could use ISCSI and do DFS replication one to each server for redundancy, or have one online and replicate to the other for backups. -----Original Message----- From: John Aldrich [mailto:jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com] Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 10:22 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN question Well, my (admittedly limited) understanding is that at the low-end SANs have a lot of overlap with NAS and that they are almost interchangeable. I want some sort of separate machine to get the "file server" role off the DCs. Maybe that means a NAS, maybe it means a SAN, maybe it means a server with DAS running Windows Storage Server. At this point, I'm not really sure what the best money would be. Whatever we get, I want it to be expandable so that as we (hopefully) grow, we can add more storage as needed. I do like the idea of having tape to back up whatever we have. If we're going to have email in-house, we're likely to end up with at least a couple terabytes of data in the long run, so whatever archival backup we end up with is likely to need to be a library, instead of just an on-board tape drive. ~ 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
