Well as meetings progress and executives sit impatiently, our D.R. plan is slowly coming together. Having to test and choose products is always a great learning experience, though doing this with deadlines takes some of the fun away.

We’ve already sat through the presentations from Lefthand and Equallogic since we’ve narrowed our choices for our production SAN down to these two venders. Just from meeting the reps from both of these companies, I’d have to say that the Lefthand guys seem more down to earth and know what the hell they are talking about. The Equallogic reps we’ve had out are just salesmen who have had minor hardware training and only answer questions with generic answers. The Lefthand guys do this for a living and for fun it seems, the Equallogic guys are just salesmen, period.

One of the biggest downsides for us with Equallogic was that when it comes down to upgrading the firmware on the modules, it will take down network connectivity for 15 seconds while it switchs over to the secondary controller inside the array. I don’t know about other companies and how they would handle their SAN being down for 15 seconds a couple times a year but I’ll pass. With Lefthand, because of their network RAID design, no downtime is required. I’d have to say we’re leaning very heavily towards Lefthand for the SAN purchase.

We’ve settled on VMware 3.5 for our virtualization needs. Virtual Iron will hopefully make it into our plans some day but they just aren’t mature enough for what we need. I’d like to actually use the licenses we’ve purchased for Virtual Iron to create a testing lab for our dept since we just don’t have space for phsyical machines.

And I finally found the time to install and configure Cacti to replace Servers Alive. The newest release from CactiEZ is really the best and easiest solution i’ve found for the price paid, FREE! The features that cacti has and the plugins available really do compare to most enterprise solutions that cost a bucket full of cash. I have almost all of our servers setup and am going through networking equipment to add as needed. In the past if a developer said they needed a new server because a current server just couldn’t handle the load, we would just buy it. Now with performance monitoring and tracking I can ask them to prove the need. In the past month i’ve had to pull statistics on a few servers for this exact reason.