New SAN is working well

We purchased a Dell MD3000 iSCSI SAN with ten 400 SAS drives for tier1 storage to replace our old Dell DAS server. We also added the MD1000 SAS storage chassis for tier2 storage using 750 GB SATA drives. We have really liked the features, performance and quality of these products. Each chassis can hold 15 drives. We are using one dedicated hot spare drive in our tier1 storage with 2 TB RAID5 volumes.

We will be using Micosoft DPM to store snapshots of our tier1 storage on the MD1000 chassis. We can also add another MD1000 chassis to this solution when we run out of space.

Virtual servers are here to stay

We have made some significant changes to our server infrastructure, over the past few months, by hosting about 13 servers on two physical Dell 860 PowerEdge servers. And we are not done yet. We have about 15 more servers that will be vitualized over the next. We ae using Windows DataCenter Edition to host unlimited VM's per server. It's sweet! All of our storage is stored on our SAN (details in another post). We are already planning for 64bit Hyper-V later this year.