Upgrading Critical Storage - the first round

Yesterday we put the Snap 18000 into the rack with the NSS, configured it to match the network, gave it two network connections, and configured the storage. We then did an initial copy of the NSS shares onto the Snap.

Plenty of the work outlined in "The Plan" taken care of in a single day. Some of today's storage is a dream to configure.

But nothing ever goes exactly according to plan. Luckily the problems I've hit thus far are minimal.

I didn't get the amount of space I was hoping for out of the Snap. Why, you ask? Because I wanted a hot spare on the RAID 5, and I wanted to save space on each volume for snapshots of the existing data (Snap handles these for you if you just set up the space and make a schedule).

So my final configuration is 900 Gig for the existing data, and 256 Gig for iSCSI on two separate volumes... That's still a lot more than we had, but I should have planned for it. Now I know.

Once everything was set up, I wanted to get a baseline of the existing system in case things fell apart on me, so I tried to set up replication. Unfortunately, the product I had intended to use was a demo, not the real McCoy. I'm now looking at replication tools to bring in for this project, and in a hurry. At this time I'm looking at the replication software Adaptec sells specifically to go on the Snap, and WANSynch by XOSoft. I don't have time to widen this search out, unfortunately, and NWC Inc. will have to live with my choice for a while.

That's it for now... I leave you with a picture of the two machines together in the rack, if you're interested.

NSS and Snap, together.