SAN, Virtualisation and Infrastructure Refresh
This project was one of the largest undertaken so far, and for the sake of completeness when publishing I shall include the work that was undertaken on the network infrastructure (switches and so on). The current infrastructure was a small room full of hand-built (literally), tower servers. Many of the servers failed frequently due to niggling hardware issues such as problems with removable hard drive caddies and so on. These failures added up to about thirty (30) instances per month.
This project was a tremendous opportunity to build an infrastructure in its entirety and deliver a solution that fulfilled the initial high-level business requirements, namely delivering highly available systems which would allow the staff to work during core business hours without suffering any “computer downtime”.
The project was broken down into various phases:
- Network infrastructure – switches, cabling, routes etc.
- Core Phase – main file servers (the servers that had the most significant “downtime”)
- Virtualisation Phase – turning the physical server estate (all those tower servers) into a virtual estate
- Archive and Backup Phases – two phases to address the archiving and backups of the file data and virtual machines
- Business Continuity and Service Levels – to start an ITIL-based infrastructure this project was the starting point to feed service levels and business continuity plans back to the business
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