Moving storage around

The EVA6100 went in just fine with that one hitch I mentioned, and now comes all the work we need to do now that we have actual space again. We're still arguing over how much space to add to which volumes, but once we decide all but Blackboard will be very easy to add.

Blackboard needs more space on both the SQL server and the Content server, and as the Content server is clustered it'll require an outage to manage the increase. And it'll be a long outage, as 300GB of weensy files takes a LONG time to copy. The SQL server uses plain old Basic partitions, so I don't think we can expand that partition, so we may have to do another full LUN copy which will require an outage. That has yet to be scheduled, but needs to happen before we get through much of the quarter.

Over on the EVA4400 side, I'm evacuating data off of the MSA1500cs onto the 4400. Once I'm done with that, I'm going to be:

1. Rebuilding all of the Disk Arrays.
2. Creating LUNs expressly for Backup-to-Disk functionality.
3. Flashing the Active/Active firmware on to it, the 7.00 firmware rev.
4. Get the two Backup servers installed with the right MPIO widgetry to take advantage of active/active on the MSA>
   

But first we need the DataProtector licensing updates to beat its way through the forest of paperwork and get ordered. Otherwise, we can't use more than 5TB of disk, and that's WAY wimpy. I need at LEAST 20, and preferably 40TB. Once that licensing is in place, we can finally decommission the out-of-license BackupExec server and use the 6 slot tape library with DataProtector instead. This should significantly increase how much data we can throw at backup devices during our backup window.

What has yet to be fully determined is exactly how we're going to use the 4400 in this scheme. I expect to get between 15-20TB of space out of the MSA once I'm done with it, and we have around 20TB on the 4400 for backup. Which is why I'd really like that 40TB license please.

Going Active/Active should do really good things for how fast the MSA can throw data at disk. As I've proven before the MSA is significantly CPU bound for I/O to parity LUNs (Raid5 and Raid6), so having another CPU in the loop should increase write throughput significantly. We couldn't do Active/Active before since you can only do Active/Active in a homogeneous OS environment, and we had Windows and NetWare pointed at the MSA (plus one non-production Linux box).

In the mean time, I watch progress bars. TB of data takes a long time to copy if you're not doing it at the block level. Which I can't.