For several months I have been working on getting a better storage and network solution for us. We are a terminal shop and we have a DAS (Direct Attached Storage). Over the years we have had many problems with network consistency, and one of the things we noticed is that we have a high input output to our DAS and on top of that our storage is older and we felt like we could get a better throughput with new equipment. Over the past year we have been virtualizing but we have been using the free version of VMWARE and part of this new SAN is the inclusion of licensed VM to utilize all they have to offer.

 (Our new SAN)

I work for a non profit and this was a hefty purchase, luckily I have an administration staff who got behind me and we were able to get the equipment ordered. We have just finished putting the equipment in and later next week the engineers will be working with us to move everything over.

    The equipment is the easy part. The hard part is moving my users, currently we use Server 2003 and we will be moving everything over to server 2008 and this has to be staged. We will create a new cluster with new IP and DNS name and currently most of our thin (dumb) clients have to be manually touched to add the new Remote Desktop. This means we will stick close to home and move a couple of clinics to the new servers and then then stagger the other locations. Currently we have 17 locations so there are many machines to touch.

Once all is said and done and the users get use to the changes we will have a better product  out there and that is what it is all about.

I will keep this post up to date and let everyone know how the install went.