Changes a-coming

Since our fiscal year slash budgetary period starts in July, we get a lot of summer projects as a result of new funding. Several things were passed out today.

We will be changing our Anti-Virus /Anti-Spam solution away from McAfee. I can't say who it is, but this is a migration and therefore a Project. The solution that won did so by having a much better anti-spam product. I was not involved in the selection process.
The Distaster Recovery SAN was approved. This'll go into the Bond Hall datacenter. It'll be an HP MSA, rather than an EVA, so we'll have to do some creative engineering to set up the data mirrors. This'll be fun. That space will also be used for backup-to-disk for some undefined instances. Policy to be set later once we have the tech on-site and have played with it. This DR SAN will be mirroring the NetWare cluster, the Exchange cluster, and the yet-to-be-built BlackBoard cluster.
We'll be getting a snazzy new tape library to support the added space in that DR SAN. Mmm. Backup hardware.
The project to come up with a fully enterprise Backup Software Solution (we don't have an internal standard) is... continuing negotiations. NetBackup is the software of choice, but they're being unreasonable when it comes to pricing.
A Student Tech Fee proposal was approved, so we'll be carving out a 2TB hunk of the SAN for GIS data. There will be a server attached to this to handle the software end of it.
We'll be getting a quote from HP about upgrading our EVA to something that can handle:

Drives larger than 30GB.
More than 4 drive shelves.

Fun times this summer. And I'll be gone a goodly percentage of July, and a week-and-a-bit in August. Summer upgrades are great! You get to do them around vacations and things, so you're already shouldering slightly higher normal workloads, and have to do all these other projects too. Plenty of high-value thingies on that list. And really, playing around with $100,000+ hardware really makes this job worth it some days.

Tags: novell, hp, san, WWU