VU Blog

Most important this month for me was the 12th week of my wife’s pregnancy. This is supposedly the line after which chance of a miscarriage is virtually zero. My wife has had the worst morning sickness in history and curses everyone woman she knows who said they had no sickness at all during their pregnancies.

• This month Owen has begun moving servers/services over to our environment. This required a lot of planning and in the end carving up of storage for the ESX environment on my part. So far several servers have been moved over and we received an e-mail complimenting the whole process. Hopefully, all our future moves will go as well.
• This month also marked the sale of the old Hitachi 9970. We received our first check for half of the purchase price.
• We finished the backup implementation this month. All of the planning ended up helping some, but several unexpected problems occurred. You can look at Evan’s blog for more details.
• Preparations for the SAN migration to the new director have been completed this month. The only thing standing in the way up to the end of this month was contract support negotiations. The contract situation was settled at the end of this month and should make migration over the next few weeks possible.
• A new project was kicked off this month to replace the current VUspace user environment. We are considering three options at this time. Celerra with webserver, Windows Cluster, and outsourcing the solution entirely.

• Backup, backup, and more backup. We went through planning and execution of our backup upgrade this month. We have a few bumps and bruises, but all in all it went fine. You can look to Evan’s blog report for all the nitty gritty details.
• We added storage to our existing Clariion infrastructure to prepare for the Owen and Law migration. Part of this required the updating of our storage diagram which I completed.
• Just over the past few days we’ve been working with Spectra in an attempt to recoup some money out of our old SAN, the Hitachi 9970.
• This month we racked a new Cisco 9509 director to be named “Nimoy”. A project is underway to split our existing SAN fabric across the existing director and this new one.
• All of our SAN infrastructure was put into Cacti this month. You can now view your throughput at the SAN Director level via Cacti. Julie added a link to it from the App Hosting page.
• This month we also performed our first movement of data across tiers of storage without an outage required on the user’s part. The data store for snf-be was moved from tier 2 to tier 1 storage. This process took about 4 days to actually complete.