Technology is awesome (and how I can’t afford it all)

Lately I have been doing some planning for budget season, and thinking about the medium-term future and where I’d like to take my infrastructure

A big part of this is storage, and my company is in a bit of an odd place in that we’re growing so fast we need to add to our MD3220i SAN, but the MD3220i itself has an expiring warranty in December 2015. I feel like it would be a waste of money to add a disk shelf in 2014 to just have it go unused by 2015.

To address this I began with my Dell team, and had a product specialist in the office today to go over their mid size and enterprise storage products: Equallogic and Compellent. He did an excellent job in making it clear the advantages of a ‘frameless’ storage infrastructure over a ‘framed’ one like we’re in now.

Since then (only a few hours ago really) my mind has just been buzzing at all the possibilities and Projects that this meeting has kickstarted.

In the form of one long run-on sentence:

If we upgrade our storage next year to an Equallogic we can utilize the storage tiering to reduce rack space and power use while maintaining performance and increasing capacity, while at the same time decommissioning old hardware (our MD3000) and re-using our slightly old hardware (MD3220i) for purposes such as backup and disaster recovery, which we’re looking at something like AppAssure or Veeam of Unitrends to handle as long as we have the appropriate disk space, which needs to be shared with Hyper-V Replica for DR purposes, because I’m severlely lacking in that area right now which is dangerous but can be solved with a multi-tier backup and DR plan of having storage on the LAN AND offsite with replication of the backup database and Hyper-V Replica but this requires a cluster upgrade to Server 2012 R2, which would be nice anyways because then I can do live VHDX expansion to avoid having to disrupt my file server because the less off-hours maintenance I have to do the better so that I can use my time doing things like analyzing performance benefits and presenting to the Executive why we need to do all this stuff RIGHT NOW.