Network restructuring advice
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@scottalanmiller said:
The first step, outside of the technical, would be to begin building a business case around the needs to understand the risk aversion financially. Once you have that you at least have solid numbers to talk to the business about rather than feelings.
This can be difficult but try to get a number on downtime. How much money is lost per minute, per hour, per day... something to that effect. This may not be a consistent number, the first five minutes of downtime might be worth zero but the first full day quite a lot. It varies by company. And you must take into account mitigation - like outages at night, time to send people to lunch, working from paper, etc.
Getting this gives us a real means of understanding the needs for availability.
I'm still trying to accumulate this info as I explained to them that they would be able to afford some downtime, and the cost for HA need to be justified against their lost, however they are more concerned with having the system up and working whenever needed, which so far appears to be all day, every day, at any time.
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@whizzard are you a consultant on this project or in house?
Expectations need to be discovered and defined before you can propose any sort of solution for them.
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@whizzard said:
@hubtechagain said:
Though segmented and long winded...
Scott is right.You need to establish the need for a backup. I'd use the drobo for a backup target. consolidate the other server functions on your actual server hardware using a hypervisor. ESXi, Hyper-V, XenServer etc... whatever flavor you like.
That is what I am considering at the moment, the problem is the current setup already has the data stored on the Drobo, so while it's already there, it isn't a backup as it's where the data actively resides.
The setup is a bit messy, so as much as I want to consolidate what is currently there on proper VMs, some would require reinstallation, which and reconfiguration. I rather do that once and limit the amount of scheduled downtime.
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not sure why you couldn't P2V. if flat files are being stored on the nas... easy peasy, move to whatever VM it belongs to post p2v. yes, down time will be required. Do it over the weekend, or over night.
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@hubtechagain said:
@whizzard are you a consultant on this project or in house?
Expectations need to be discovered and defined before you can propose any sort of solution for them.
In house, taking over from previous consultants. Their expectations, which the are adamant about is "everything just work" and they are concerned about the security of their data so backups are a priority as well.I just prefer to proceed with a holistic plan in mind that continue with the mosaic already there
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Well, if that's their attitude....good luck. Of course we/they/everyone wants it to just work. But if they want it to "always work" that takes a good bit of work/planning/etc IMO easiest of which would be Virtualization either locally with colocation for DR or a pure virtual "cloud" fix. not knowing what the business is, application load etc makes it a little tough to recommend anything specific.
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@hubtechagain said:
not sure why you couldn't P2V. if flat files are being stored on the nas... easy peasy, move to whatever VM it belongs to post p2v. yes, down time will be required. Do it over the weekend, or over night.
They are VM's already, but they aren't configured properly and software are installed across VMs
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check your chat bubble
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Is it advisable to mix HDD types in a RAID? i.e. SSDs with non SSDs?
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you can.... but you're only as fast as your slowest drive.
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@whizzard said:
Is it advisable to mix HDD types in a RAID? i.e. SSDs with non SSDs?
It is not advisable to mix drives in any way if possible. You want absolutely identical drives in every way for optimum value, wear and performance. Even two drives of the same basic specs (size, spindle speed) is not as good as totally identical drives. You want all spindle and arm movements to align whenever possible.
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I agree with Scott, to get them on board with spending the kind of money they might need to spend to get where they think they want to be HA wise, they will need to provide you with number related to how much downtime costs so you can show them that investing x amount of capital could save them from that downtime. Now, if you've been given a blank check to 'just fix it' that great for you for the moment, but you don't learn the proper process, and frankly, neither do they.
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What is currently running on the R730? Is there enough processing power to run all work loads of the two PCs and whatever is currently on the R730, on the 730?
What are you thinking about for backups? Once you're completely virtualized you could use Veeam, or you could look at getting a Unitrends box (though be prepared for several thousand dollar bill on that one). It doesn't appear that you can use the Drobo as a backup target, as you mentioned it's already being used for live data.
You could look into purchasing a used Dell with spinning drives(unless you have budget/performance need for SSDs), virtualize the two PCs onto it.
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@whizzard said:
The Drobo is a B800i with 12TB (10.91TB actual) 5.42TB usable, the other for "protection"
All Drobo are limited to RAID 5 or RAID 6, that's all that they do.
The B800i is a rack mounted SAN (I have one myself), it cannot be used as a file share. How exactly is it being used? A SAN is not a file server.
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@whizzard said:
The Drobo is a B800i with 12TB (10.91TB actual) 5.42TB usable...
Memory is 16GB in the prolian, 2GB in the proxy and about 4GB in the email server.
Current application server stated 678.5GB storage capacity. Can't state the others atm, but given the age and that the are desktops I wouldn't but any bast 500GBSo total memory is 22GB and total capacity is under 8TB. That will all easily fit into a single R730 with tons of extra processing power.
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@hubtechagain said:
You need to establish the need for a backup. I'd use the drobo for a backup target. consolidate the other server functions on your actual server hardware using a hypervisor. ESXi, Hyper-V, XenServer etc... whatever flavor you like.
But, the Drobo is a great backup target. Huge capacity and it can be increased. You can easily get 36TB usable on a Drobo B800i. And that's usable after RAID 6 overhead. You can get bigger, but you start getting into really expensive helium filled drives and whatnot right at the moment.
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@hubtechagain said:
ESXi, Hyper-V, XenServer etc... whatever flavor you like.
ESXi is the only one I would avoid these days. Quality code, but the cost is ridiculously high and no matter how much you can manage to spend, you always have to deal with licensing overhead penalties, unnecessary complication, paperwork and lacking features you didn't pay for or justifying each feature as you go.
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@whizzard said:
That is what I am considering at the moment, the problem is the current setup already has the data stored on the Drobo, so while it's already there, it isn't a backup as it's where the data actively resides.
That's going to be very tough. And backing up a SAN is dramatically harder than backing up other storage types as you cannot back it up directly but only through the systems that are attached to it. You can't simply buy another B800i and replicate or get backup software that can back it up. It takes a lot more resources and effort to back up.
The first step, I think, would be prepping the R730 for use for "everything" and migrating that huge B800i workload over to it ASAP. Once that is done, repurpose the B800i as the backup target ASAP.
If the capacity of the B800i is not enough to handle all of the backups once there are versions and whatnot, you can get bigger drives for it to handle that. Or if necessary, a second B800i is not a massive investment.
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@whizzard said:
I'm still trying to accumulate this info as I explained to them that they would be able to afford some downtime, and the cost for HA need to be justified against their lost, however they are more concerned with having the system up and working whenever needed, which so far appears to be all day, every day, at any time.
Well just explain that this isn't possible or rational or logical and certainly reflects a misunderstanding of business. Ask them how they would apply the same "rules" to non-IT needs like vehicles, manufacturing equipment or buildings. How would they ensure that they always had a building to use with power, water, etc.? What if there was a fire, or a storm or a municipal emergency?
They can protect against this by having a second building next door, but that only protects against certain things. So they can add a building in another state. That protects against many more, but still not all. And what if the roads are closed or they don't have time to drive to the other building?
They can keep protecting against more and more risks but the cost of doing so gets very high, very quickly. IT is exactly the same. No matter how much they spend the risk never hits zero and different things address different risk. HA is primarily about non-IT things like power, HVAC, flood protection, etc. So are you overseeingn all of those things or just parts that honestly are pretty trivial?
Put some perspective on it. Make sure that you don't back down until they feel like complete idiots for having suggested such a thing. Either they truly are complete idiots to have said such a thing or, more likely, it's not been explained in a way they can grasp.
