This is where I whine about not having enough money.
It has been a common complaint amongst my co-workers that WWU wants enterprise level service for a SOHO budget. Especially for the Win/Novell environments. Our Solaris stuff is tied in closely to our ERP product, SCT Banner, and that gets big budget every 5 years to replace. We really need the same kind of thing for the Win/Novell side of the house, such as this disk-array replacement project we're doing right now.
The new EVAs are being paid for by Student Tech Fee, and not out of a general budget request. This is not how these devices should be funded, since the scope of this array is much wider than just student-related features. Unfortunately, STF is the only way we could get them funded, and we desperately need the new arrays. Without the new arrays, student service would be significantly impacted over the next fiscal year.
The problem is that the EVA3000 contains between 40-45% directly student-related storage. The other 55-60% is Fac/Staff storage. And yet, the EVA3000 was paid for by STF funds in 2003. Huh.
The summer of 2007 saw a Banner Upgrade Project, when the servers that support SCT Banner were upgraded. This was a quarter million dollar project and it happens every 5 years. They also got a disk-array upgrade to a pair of StorageTek (SUN, remember) arrays, DR replicated between our building and the DR site in Bond Hall. I believe they're using Solaris-level replication rather than Array-level replication.
The disk-array upgrade we're doing now got through the President's office just before the boom went down on big expensive purchases. It languished in the Purchasing department due to summer-vacation related under-staffing. I hate to think how late it would have gone had it been subjected to the added paperwork we now have to go through for any purchase over $1000. Under no circumstances could we have done it before Fall quarter. Which would have been bad, since we were too short to deal with the expected growth of storage for Fall quarter.
Now that we're going deep into the land of VMWare ESX, centralized storage-arrays are line of business. Without the STF funded arrays, we'd be stuck with "Departmental" and "Entry-level" arrays such as the much maligned MSA1500, or building our own iSCSI SAN from component parts (a DL385, with 2x 4-channel SmartArray controller cards, 8x MSA70 drive enclosures, running NetWare or Linux as an iSCSI target, with bonded GigE ports for throughput). Which would blow chunks. As it is, we're still stuck using SATA drives for certain 'online' uses, such as a pair of volumes on our NetWare cluster that are low usage but big consumers of space. Such systems are not designed for the workloads we'd have to subject them to, and are very poor performers when doing things like LUN expansions.
The EVA is exactly what we need to do what we're already doing for high-availability computing, yet is always treated as an exceptional budget request when it comes time to do anything big with it. Since these things are hella expensive, the budgetary powers-that-be balk at approving them and like to defer them for a year or two. We asked for a replacement EVA in time for last year's academic year, but the general-budget request got denied. For this year we went, IIRC, both with general-fund and STF proposals. The general fund got denied, but STF approved it. This needs to change.
By October, every person between and Governor Gregoir will be new. My boss is retiring in October. My grandboss was replaced last year, my great grand boss also has been replaced in the last year, and the University President stepped down on September 1st. Perhaps the new people will have a broader perspective on things and might permit the budget priorities to be realigned to the point that our disk-arrays are classified as the critical line-of-business investments they are.
It has been a common complaint amongst my co-workers that WWU wants enterprise level service for a SOHO budget. Especially for the Win/Novell environments. Our Solaris stuff is tied in closely to our ERP product, SCT Banner, and that gets big budget every 5 years to replace. We really need the same kind of thing for the Win/Novell side of the house, such as this disk-array replacement project we're doing right now.
The new EVAs are being paid for by Student Tech Fee, and not out of a general budget request. This is not how these devices should be funded, since the scope of this array is much wider than just student-related features. Unfortunately, STF is the only way we could get them funded, and we desperately need the new arrays. Without the new arrays, student service would be significantly impacted over the next fiscal year.
The problem is that the EVA3000 contains between 40-45% directly student-related storage. The other 55-60% is Fac/Staff storage. And yet, the EVA3000 was paid for by STF funds in 2003. Huh.
The summer of 2007 saw a Banner Upgrade Project, when the servers that support SCT Banner were upgraded. This was a quarter million dollar project and it happens every 5 years. They also got a disk-array upgrade to a pair of StorageTek (SUN, remember) arrays, DR replicated between our building and the DR site in Bond Hall. I believe they're using Solaris-level replication rather than Array-level replication.
The disk-array upgrade we're doing now got through the President's office just before the boom went down on big expensive purchases. It languished in the Purchasing department due to summer-vacation related under-staffing. I hate to think how late it would have gone had it been subjected to the added paperwork we now have to go through for any purchase over $1000. Under no circumstances could we have done it before Fall quarter. Which would have been bad, since we were too short to deal with the expected growth of storage for Fall quarter.
Now that we're going deep into the land of VMWare ESX, centralized storage-arrays are line of business. Without the STF funded arrays, we'd be stuck with "Departmental" and "Entry-level" arrays such as the much maligned MSA1500, or building our own iSCSI SAN from component parts (a DL385, with 2x 4-channel SmartArray controller cards, 8x MSA70 drive enclosures, running NetWare or Linux as an iSCSI target, with bonded GigE ports for throughput). Which would blow chunks. As it is, we're still stuck using SATA drives for certain 'online' uses, such as a pair of volumes on our NetWare cluster that are low usage but big consumers of space. Such systems are not designed for the workloads we'd have to subject them to, and are very poor performers when doing things like LUN expansions.
The EVA is exactly what we need to do what we're already doing for high-availability computing, yet is always treated as an exceptional budget request when it comes time to do anything big with it. Since these things are hella expensive, the budgetary powers-that-be balk at approving them and like to defer them for a year or two. We asked for a replacement EVA in time for last year's academic year, but the general-budget request got denied. For this year we went, IIRC, both with general-fund and STF proposals. The general fund got denied, but STF approved it. This needs to change.
By October, every person between and Governor Gregoir will be new. My boss is retiring in October. My grandboss was replaced last year, my great grand boss also has been replaced in the last year, and the University President stepped down on September 1st. Perhaps the new people will have a broader perspective on things and might permit the budget priorities to be realigned to the point that our disk-arrays are classified as the critical line-of-business investments they are.
Budget sucks all over, no one wants to actually pay for fast infrastructure, they want it fast and invisible. But always look at the leftovers. In that aftermath of our san/SVC project we're building a new backup server out of spare parts, one of those maligned MSA1000's and 3 SCSI arrays adds up to 13.2 TB of raid5 so we can have about 4 days of live onsite rather than 1 day that we have now. Redploying the leftovers give you a chance to be creative,