I would like to ask you all your opinion on this.

IF you had a blank slate, and needed to provide the following solution, what Hardware and Software manufactures would you choose? The environment size today is 60 physical window’s servers and 8TB of disk for Oracle DB’s.

You need to provide back end storage and migrate to a virtual server environment and implement an effective back up process (no need to off site, just to tape)

What partner's would you "marry" together for this solution and why?

David,

Blank slate. OK. Let's start with collapsing the 60 physical Windows servers. I would high-level goal for half the power and half the space. I would consider HP, IBM and Sun for data-center server replacements and I'd probably be partial out of the gate to the Sun Blade 6000 Family and HP and IBM would have to sell me off of Sun. My blade strategy will save on a number of other data center essentials, network ports, etc. and give me more flexibility to provide application performance where needed at better price points than continually adding to the 60 dedicated servers, which adds to my people management over head as well. Where I want to be is adding compute resources (keeping overhead low on my admin staff) connected to shared storage, no I/O bottlenecks, with Infiniband over Ethernet. HP Blades is probably a very strong second, but with my OS choice (OpenSolaris) (and others like MySQL) I will lean towards Sun servers.

Next, I want to go off shore and hire a development team to migrate all of my in-house Oracle apps off of Oracle and re-write them for MySQL and/or PostgreSQL. Put a contain and divest strategy in place to review all Oracle and Windows licenses and use my off-shore team to migrate all of my in house developed Oracle applications to MySql or PostgreSQL and test and migrate Windows server licenses to OpenSolaris or other Linux vendors such as Xandros where I can replace Windows on both my Servers and Desktop with a single Linux provider.

I would create a moving forward standard for all my commercial vendors still using Oracle that I expect them to deliver a open source version otherwise I will review alternatives to move off of their products.

OK, we have servers, and apps and OS.

Storage, what's important to me is that I can have a n-tiered storage infrastructure, and include tape and off-line as well. Most data centers get bit with long-term storage requirements so I want to consider these upfront. I need a heterogeneous storage management tool, so I don't have to train my storage admins on a bunch of different vendor management tools, Netapps, EMC, HP, etc. I would review Linux vendors who are releasing management tools for managing databases, storage, and more, these are likely candidates for opensource SNMP monitoring and management of various core opensource technologies like MySQL and Xen.

On the storage side, you almost can't go wrong with the big four, each have their advantages and disadvantages, but they all work best when you apply "vendor lockin" once you go to a mixed environment your much more on your own. So you have to look a few layers up and the application stack, Netapps Snapmanager for Oracle is a great tool for example, and a reason to be partial towards NetApps if your running Oracle, but I'm moving off of Oracle. SAM-FS for Sun is very solid for managing data lifecycles which is important, so if long-term archival, and logical and physical migrations is a requirement you want this tool embedded in your storage infrastructure to make life easier. I'd probably deploy low cost NAS devices from Sun, they are very competitive price wise today over the others, I’ll keep the high-end SAN, on NetApps today, although if DR to a remote datacenter is a critical then EMC’s SRDF is so mature that it starts to tilt the NetApps choice. Again, you really don’t go wrong on this end, a few trade-offs and cost and integration into the rest of the environment. NetApps and even EMC can be more price competitive than the high-end Hitachi which would be my ultimate choice. I’d want tape from Sun and a mix of FC and SATA contained in a CIS system from Sun, with ZFS and SAM-FS. On the commodity disk side I’d include a Tier2 SATA Beat from a Tier2 players like Nexsan.

Onto Virtualization, I would have VMWare, and start testing and migrating to Xen where possible.

Blank slate, so have some fun.

Good Luck,
Peter
May 2008

* http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/6000/support.xml
* http://www.nexsan.com/satabeast.php