glennda

How much would 3TB of SSD's cost?

Read my post re Nimble - you get SSD performance from Sata drives.

Then talk to Nimble - they will save you a shed load of space/cost as there snapshots are soooo much more efficient than the likes of IBM/Dell/EMC. The figure I like to quote is 3.5tb of Exchange data on an Equallogic required 18.4tb of snapshot space whereas nimble used 350gb

Not everybody - Nimble will get you better performance from Sata drives than the equivalent equallogic running ssd's....

The IBM kit is nice - but uses very outdated technology. why so much storeage? is that for actual data or saving snapshots etc on the san?

it completly depends on what model you are after plus disk space (models depend on how many iops you need). The warranty is for as long as you have support. Support is excellent. Each Nimble device checks back in with support every 5mins send 30 million sensors data back. This is this auto processed and if there are any areas of concern a case is created. Also they will do preemptive swapouts of disks rather than wait until one has failed. The reason you probably have never heard of them is that they have only been around since 2010. The CTO is one of the engineers who designed WAFL (write anywhere file layout) at NetApp and has revelutionised the way data is written when compared to WAFL or ZFS

Sans can vary completly. You need to understand what you want to run before you look at what you can get and budget wise. The solutions i recommend (in order) Nimble < Soooo Cool considering it users Sata drives and will give you probably the best performance when compared to others (base model around 15-20k iops from Sata using CASL High end will give you 60-80k iops from sata/nearline sas) Dell Equallogic < Not quite as good large block size and built in snapshots are not great Open-E (Budget but good bang for buck depending on hardware) Dothill HP (the MSA range is rebadged Dothill) Dell (non equalogic) they are rebranded low end netapp EDIT: I have used all of the above in various forms

Veeam will do the replication but not in real time - go for as much memory as possible, if you think you need 64 go to a 100, you will use it (and its always nice to have plenty of extra capacity)

Yup I would go with sharing the load across both hosts, you can actually provide HA and live migration now without the need for a SAN. When it comes to memory, think about what you need, double it then add some more (it is always needed!). Along with running Veeam on the physical backup server I would also make this a Physical DC. Are you planning on buying ESXI License or are you wanting to use the free version? If so Veeam is not supported on this platform. With regards to the D2T then Veeam will shortly support this in the coming release.

But the idea of Veeam is that the original file is not modified and it just adds additional snapshot files for the VM's (depending on how you backup and retention periods) so technically you could set it to keep the data for 90 days and not pay a deletion fee. Transfers into the system are free. But there is loads of other options and vendors they support.

It depends what you class as expensive I woke out of education now and don't class 5tb at £6/700pm that expensive, whereas in education you would class this as expensive I guess, with the initial device including unlimited server licenses with onsite virtulization around 8k initially (Siris). Or Without Onsite Virtulization about 3.5/4k. and slightly less a month (Siris Lite). (included unlimited support and monitoring) this is for a 5TB model, they come in smaller and larger capacities which and different prices. SIRIS_Lite_Brochure.pdfSIRIS_Brochure.pdf You could also look at solutions like Veeams Cloud edition which can tie directly into things like Amazon Glacier and Amazon S3 which are low cost per month. (5tb is 112.64 a month and data has to be kept for more than 90 days) Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition for VMware and Hyper-V

Its brilliant and the more advanced version (papercut MF) you can actually intergrate into photocopiers so the photocopies are also included in it

Personally I would look at Hybrid Cloud, so you backup backup to disk locally and then it replicates itself out to the cloud. I can highly recommend the Datto Units which do this utilizing the Shadowsnap protect software. It also will provide the ability to launch servers from the backup appliance and join them back into the network. You can also if required then pxeboot a server off the back of the appliance and restore your server back to it.

Personally I would go for something a bit beefier than the 1910 then. Something along the lines of the 2510G-48, 2530-48G, 2810-48G (Layer 2 only)

Yup - the CLI is fine although when I turned up to site I looked a little silly as had to lookup the command line reference as it wasn't what i expected.

Well yes - 2003 SP2 is EOL AFAIK (or will be shortly), but Windows server 2008 is also going EOL shortly for SP2 (July). TBH its worth going to 2008 R2 at the least but it will require a reinstall on the applications

What kind of load/throughput you planning? The V1910 is a 3com model.

How many fibre converters are you trying to replace? And what speed do you want? We could then recommend some hardware.

And now a nightmare to deal with if you want to use any of there products

How big is your database? i don't know if they have fixed it but do you use the graphs etc on the home screen? This can cause dreadful performance.

Well the whole DR plan should also include things like printers too. I don't think there is any set standards which have to be met with Education is there? Apart from best practices? maybe @Grumbledock might know more. I know with law firms and the such like they have a minimum standard they have to be able to maintain in order to be able to practise.

100% agree everything should be back in a timely order, but its having priorities hence the point in planning properly and also getting it all in and tested. In all the DR plans and testing I have done there is always something which crops up which affects RPO and RTO's and the order in which services need to be brought back online.

There are multiple main distributors in UK which hold stock of the most common parts such as C2000, Ingram Micro, AVnet, Westcoast etc. Depending on who your suppliers use there is always stock on the channel and available next day 99.9% of the time, and in the event of DR having first choice hardware isn't always nessicarly getting up and running is, it can always be migrated after.

Awesome Cheers

I would just put a list of suppliers in the document and the specs required, then its a case of going with whoever can get you the kit the quickest in the event of DR. All depends on your projected RTO's (Recovery time Objective, ie how long do you have to get things running)