Replacing Servers / SAN / Core Switches / Backup at the same time

[nikaso]

Looking for some advice / opinions.....

 

As per the title we are coming to the end of our lease on the above equipment and I have had most of our tender responses back to replace all of this equipment. There is a bit of a question in my mind though about where best to spend the money.....let me explain.

 

Do I weight the money to be spent towards fast storage or more towards more powerful servers? Or do I spend more money on the core switching element?

 

My gut feeling is that provided the servers spec'd are acceptable then spending a bit more money on something like a Dell Compellent SAN populated with a mix of SSD and 15k HDDs with its tiering abilities over a traditional SAN populated with some 15k but mainly 10k HDDs would give us the most bang for our buck.

 

A bit of a curveball is a converged solution with combined servers and SAN on the same 2U unit, offers some cost advantages but I've heard some horror stories about when they go wrong.

 

Switches on the tender range from HPE 5700 flexfabric models to Aruba 5406 to Meraki switches. I think any of these could do the job but the 5700 series HPs are the cheapest.

 

Backups to my mind are much of a muchness (we have Veeam) so the actual hardware doing the backup isn't so important provided the capacity is sufficient.

 

What are people's thoughts?

[NB9457]

We are in a similar position, I've been looking towards Unifi for switching and wireless and haven't heard enough bad things to sway me away.

 

As for servers I'm assuming you're already running a cluster? If so, I think you'd see more performance in a new SAN with faster drives and a faster backbone, clusters have enough redundancy to not worry too much, could probably get another 3 years from our 4 year old servers with no problems, but as the SAN contains moving parts and is essentially the heart of the network, I'd be wary running it past 4/5 years old, be ok to convert to an additional backup though!

[nikaso]

We are in a similar position, I've been looking towards Unifi for switching and wireless and haven't heard enough bad things to sway me away.

 

As for servers I'm assuming you're already running a cluster? If so, I think you'd see more performance in a new SAN with faster drives and a faster backbone, clusters have enough redundancy to not worry too much, could probably get another 3 years from our 4 year old servers with no problems, but as the SAN contains moving parts and is essentially the heart of the network, I'd be wary running it past 4/5 years old, be ok to convert to an additional backup though!

 

Yep, VMware clusters. Plan B is actually buying out the lease on our current equipment if budgets prove to be insufficient so we might end up stuck with current servers but I will insist on a new SAN at a minimum.

[FN-GM]

Throw a curve ball here...

 

Have you considered having VM's hosted on Google or Azure or something and they paying for a decent leased line and backup line? I have been looking at this recently and it is coming out cheaper, plus there is the advantages of a a backup and not having servers running in the building.

[NB9457]

Refurb servers are very cheap anyway, even for good spec if you got stuck.

 

Cost wise you could potentially save a few quid if you looked into a HyperV Failover Cluster, cost saving is quite big but obviously it depends how invested/content you are with VMware

[NB9457]

Throw a curve ball here...

 

Have you considered having VM's hosted on Google or Azure or something and they paying for a decent leased line and backup line? I have been looking at this recently and it is coming out cheaper, plus there is the advantages of a a backup and not having servers running in the building.

 

This has been mentioned a few times, but surely unless you had Gigabit internet, you'd see a slow down? We have a 100Mb line and if we went that route, surely it'd be just like going back from a Gigabit to a 100Mb network?

[localzuk]

This has been mentioned a few times, but surely unless you had Gigabit internet, you'd see a slow down? We have a 100Mb line and if we went that route, surely it'd be just like going back from a Gigabit to a 100Mb network?

It depends on what exactly you are doing in the cloud. If you are hosting your fileservers, which you then haul data to and from, then yes, there'll be a slowdown.

 

However, if you actually do things in a cloudy way, you can reduce a lot of that - eg. use Office 365 for document storage. Use Smart's cloud service for their files etc...

 

It depends if you're just plonking your existing setup in the cloud, or if you are actually replacing it with new technologies. Doing the latter is hard work, especially all at once!

[njc235]

The 5700 is a great switch but be aware that it does not do Multicast routing. If you use any imaging softeware which uses Multicast then you should have something in the core which can perform this function. The 5700 was brought out as a port extender to the 5900 series and not really as a core switch.

[HPlum78]

I like @localzuk think that you are in the right position to think about a cloudy solution to this, if you plan this solution correctly then you can get a lot for your money and take out some of your onsite hardware dependencies for servers and file storage. I know that this will divide the room and I am not saying that an all out lift and shift is the way to use the cloud but there are now a lot of compelling arguments to moving services to the (a) cloud. Mail/ file storage and the likes are prime suspects for this in my view. Edited April 24, 2017 by HPlum78