Spending money

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Today we spent more money in one day than I've ever seen done here. Why? Well substantiated rumor had it that the Governor had a spending freeze directive on her desk. Unlike last year's freeze, this one would be the sort passed down during the 2001-02 recession; nothing gets spent without OFM approval. Veterans of that era noted that such approval took a really long time, and only sometimes came. Office scuttle-butt was mum on whether or not consumable purchases like backup tapes would be covered.

We cut purchase orders today and rushed them through Purchasing. A Purchasing who was immensely snowed under, as can be well expected. I think final signatures get signed tomorrow.

What are we getting? Three big things:
  1. A new LTO4 tape library. I try not to gush lovingly at the thought, but keep in mind I've been dealing with SDLT320 and old tapes. I'm trying not to let all that space go to my head. 2 drives, 40-50 slots, fibre attached. Made of love. No gushing, no gushing...
  2. Fast, cheap storage. Our EVA6100 is just too expensive to keep feeding. So we're getting 8TB of 15K fast storage. We needs it, precious.
  3. Really cheap storage. Since the storage area networking options all came in above our stated price-point, we're ending up with direct-attached. Depending on how we slice it, between 30-35TB of it. Probably software ISCSI and all the faults inherent in the setup. We still need to dicker over software.
But... that's all we're getting for the next 15 months at least. Now when vendors cold call me I can say quite truthfully, "No money, talk to me in July 2011."

The last thing we have is an email archiving system. We already know what we want, but we're waiting on determination of whether or not we can spend that already ear-marked money.

Unfortunately, I'll be finding out a week from Monday. I'll be out of the office all next week. Bad timing for it, but can't be avoided.

2 Comments

do post about which e-mail archiving system you end up. your setup mimics ours so much its not even funny.

I would like to know more about the 35 TB of storage. My employer has a couple of new clients who keep bringing up such numbers and we haven't decided on the best way to go about getting that into place.