Totally New Infrastructure

[ashleypoxon]

Hi,

I have the opportunity to refresh all of our server infrastructure. The company are currently working on an old NT4 domain with acient hardware to suit this. This needs to be replaced and quick. We have about 20 servers in total ranging from NT4 to Server 2003, some are just print servers, a PDC, and some host our main SQL database, as well as other bespoke applications. Not all of the servers are going to be replaced just yet. My main goal is to replace the NT4 domain and the print servers, possibly also the file server. We have about 110 users in the office, with another 130 across the globe who come in through remote access.

What I'm thinking is, do I go for rackmounted servers with their own disks, or look at the possibility of implementing SAN. We do not have a massive budget and this would be my main concern as I do not think our organization would really benefit fropm the high availability that this product offers. We do not need to have 100% uptime.

I personally was thinking of going for a DL380 and running XenServer to virtualize our infrastructure.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

 

[blister911]

Have you looked into blades? I'm not saying they would be a better fit for your organization, but depending on what you run, they could provide a smaller footprint. They do have the capability to contain 2 or more hard drives so you wouldn't HAVE to have a SAN. Generally speaking, there is usually a cost avoidance with blades because they will produce less heat, requiring less cooling, and use less power than a comparable number of rack mount servers.

It's just a thought.

Also, I think the DL380 is a pretty good system. I see they have the G6 models out now.

Blister

 

[cajuntank]

I like the blade system as well. Even if you don't do a full blown SAN, I'd look into one of their Windows 2008 Storage Servers (which are DL based anyway) that has Microsoft's iSCSI target software. That way you get your feet wet into iSCSI SAN. Of course you could do DAS (direct attached storage) by going external with a storage enclosure or they also have some 6 HD slot storage blades.
I have been using HP's DL series since I started with my current job and love them to death. I just recently got a c3000 enclosure and plan to use it more as I retire some of my DL(s) in the future.

One word of advise, HP has sizer utilities that can help you plan/design your hardware based on the application usage and users for that machine. It's what I used for doing my AD, SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint, OCS, File/Print, and SCOM designs.

 

[ashleypoxon]

Thanks for the replies, I am now looking into the Blade technology. Would you look into the virtualization as a must-have?

 

[acl03]

We use XenServer on a dl580, but it would work fine on a 380 (just not as many ram/cpu sockets). I love it, and it's cheap.

Thanks,
Andrew

Hard work often pays off over time, but procrastination pays off right now!

 

[blister911]

For us virualization was not a must-have, it was a nice-to-have. However, now that we have it, I can't see us ever getting away from it. Actually, we're looking into getting more VM servers. We want to be able to vmotion everything off of a single server (host) so we can do maintenance on it without taking any of the guest servers down or affecting their performance.

By the way our VM servers are full-height blades in our HP C-class chassis.

 

[Shad007]

We moved into a virtualised architecture about 6 months ago and it's been nothing short of fantastic, it can be a costly exercise but if you invest the capital up-front you will notice that your following years infrastrucure costs will be low. You will need to be careful with SAN diskspace as VM's will chew them up

we have 3 dl380 g5's in each site with 32gb per box. This was a little overkill for our needs so if you're looking at this type of scenario, i'd suggest to invest in extra disks (San raiding really hurts!)