He says Xiotech would have charged around $70,000 to upgrade to 4 Tbytes. "We ended up paying $95,000 for 12 terabytes and two new switches."
A benefit Burnley hadn't counted on was the ability to add servers that boot directly off the SAN without disk. MSP boots though a QLogic HBA that connects servers directly to the SAN. Burnley says that makes it easier to load new servers, employ patches, and recover from a second server if one fails.
"When we add a server now, Pillar's caching takes five minutes to load the server from a CD. Five minutes, and you're sitting there with a new server. Before it would take about 30 to 60 minutes," he says.
Burnley's shop started doing snapshots after installing the Axiom, enabling disaster recovery in conjunction with booting off the SAN. "When we add a drive to the SAN, we make a snapshot of that drive and copy it over to another part of the SAN," Burnley says. "We apply patches, updates, and if something goes wrong, I copy that other drive back from the snapshot and put it into place." He hopes to start replicating soon, but he is still searching for a colocation site.
On the downside, Burnley's also looking to make upgrades to his Pillar system without downtime. That's not possible, he says, until Pillar upgrades its software. "Their one downfall now is to make an upgrade to the SAN you have to take the system down and reboot," Burnley says. "They're promising that goes away in version 2.0 of their software. Then you'll be able to upgrade half the system while the other half runs in production, so you can upgrade without downtime."
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