I am in the process of collecting data and defining storage requirements for a much larger organization as a part of a project at work. We are supposed to stick to the "what" and not the "how" of things. This means staying away from vendor specific terms, architectures, and methods. The "what" of storage is very short; only about 24 pages of requirements compared to over 50 pages of server requirements. We have found it very difficult to get too far into the storage environment before we start talking about proprietary aspects of the environment. We have had to fall back on defining service level requirements for storage. If we had a comprehensive storage performance program in place we could fall back on that and use historical performance data at our guide. The "what" and not the "how" of storage is much more difficult that I initially thought.

posted: 10:23:12 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

Over the past few weeks I have been dealing with some issues with expanding usage on an EMC Celerra frame I have in my data center. Our approach has been to dedicate specific data movers to specific customers and charge them back for the data movers and their percentage of the Celerra frame. The issue I ran into was in adding more customers with fail-over requirements; the fail-over data mover must be configured identically to the production data movers. If you have two sets of production data movers that are configured differently we need a fail-over data mover for each set of production data movers. We thought we could slip by with a single fail-over data mover for two sets of production data movers. This was not the case and it ended up costing us an additional $50K plus. EMC has a new NAS head out, but it only supports Windows. I need a low cost alternative to the Celerra that supports NFS but uses disk in a Symmetrix.

posted: 3:13:19 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

I've been sucked into a number of projects at work that have become all consuming. It's quite frustrating, actually. I've had to forgo my personal writing and research. I hope to pick things up again in the next week or so.

posted: 12:58:03 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()