Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Storage expansion with minimal budget, hmm...

A good friend of mine emailed me asking for my opinion on what he should do about his company's growing data storage needs. They're expecting 2x data and traffic growth. The concern is their existing NetApp may not be able to handle the additional load and it'll require additional disk shelves for the anticipated data growth. These are valid concerns and it's usually not rocket science to figure out. However as I dug deeper the situation was worse than I'd expected. Pretty quickly it was obvious that upgrading the filer to a bigger box is out of the question and not only that the existing filer is out of maintenance too. As if that wasn't bad enough his company doesn't want to spend the kind of money NetApp wants for maintenance renewal. Ouch!

So now he's got several issues to deal with here:

1. There's a performance concern
2. There's a need for additional storage
3. The filer's not under maintenance
4. The company has almost no budget and wants to 'take care of this' with 'creative means'

To me this is a recipe for a disaster, the company thinks they're saving money by getting rid of the maintenance and wanting to do things by 'creative means' but they don't realize they could lose way more money should they experience an outage especially in a business where uptime equates to dollars.

The only suggestion I had was to buy a couple of used disk shelves on ebay, attach it to the filer, look for third party hardware maintenance and hope that the filer perfoms well. Of course, him being a sharp guy he starts to think of how he can further protect the data and improve the uptime using rsync etc. This would be an OK approach for a startup but for a well established company this doesn't make sense to me. Sure it's all well and good until the disaster strikes. Then all the time you thought you were rsync'ing the files successfully were actually having problems and because you didn't have the bandwidth to keep a close eye on yet another home grown solution your company is now losing $$$$ while you're working round the clock to piece the data back together.

Having said that I realize sometimes you gotta take the risks and do what you gotta do but make sure all the bigwigs know exactly ALL the risks and never attempt to guarantee against data loss...stuff happens.

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