Sam’s SAN Diary Week #26: Refocusing the Project Scope

We have made some decisions based on our design summit and redefined our goals for the calendar year. The original end-of-year goal was to provide remote access to our mirrored data and applications via Citrix using the SunGard Internet connection. Our revised goal is to have all the phase one data mirrored at SunGard by year's end, with the remote-access component completed in 1Q '04.

As part of that strategy, and given the insights from the design summit, we have made the following project modifications:

1. Citrix users will be supported using mandatory profiles. Some limited customizations will be saved via registry exports and batch files, but they will be limited. Since our practice is to keep business files in our document-management system, there is no need to replicated the "user servers" that hold roaming profiles and home area files. This means two servers ready for migration to the SAN can continue to use their internal storage.

2. While we are attracted to the concept of virtualized servers for imaging existing servers and footprint consolidation, the cost of new hardware and challenge of incorporating this new technology actually would introduce delay. And we are already a quarter behind.

Also, we have some old NetWare servers we can refurbish for some of the phase one server needs. There was always this nagging concern that we would purchase new servers for disaster-recovery use, an unlikely scenario by definition. The servers I had in mind for VMWare were 50K each, to run 10 to 20 virtual servers a piece.

VMware is still exciting, but the EMC support on Clariion has limitations. My management wants to wait and see how strong the Microsoft Virtual Server product looks when it is released (1Q '04) before deciding if 2004 is the year to introduce virtual server technology to our operations.

VMWare remains very impressive technically, especially the ESX 2.1 release with the Control Center and vMotion. It was also a class act, refunding course registrations just a few days before the classes we were signed up to take were starting.

3. We used Thanksgiving weekend to relocate the disaster-recovery Clariion to SunGard with it containing a mirror of our document management system files. The four-day week allows us to use Friday to do the move during business hours, when support resources from movers to engineers will be accessible.

NEXT WEEK: The project reaches a major milestone.

Sam Blumenstyk is the technology operations manager at Schulte Roth & Zabel, a midsize Manhattan law firm. Each week, follow Blumenstyk along as he upgrades his company's storage infrastructure and builds a SAN.

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