The new server is installed!

We installed the new server yesterday. It has new disk drive technology on it that I have not seen or used before. The drives are very small - the 2.5" size that are used in laptops. They are still hot-swap so they cost an arm and a leg more. We set up the OS and the SQL Server transaction logs on their own mirrored sets on the server itself. For the data we had to go to an external storage enclosure which holds regular sized hot swap drives. The data drives are set up on RAID 1+0 - mirrored sets of a striped set. So even though the drives are 300GB each and we have eight of them, we only have 1.2TB of usable space. We split that into two logical drives of 558GB each - NTFS overhead takes up the rest.

A new server project was approved today!

The boss approved the purchase of a new server and rack today. We've outgrown our old SQL server and are moving up to a 1.2TB RAID 10 unit. It's an HP Proliant DL380 G5 Quad Core with 4GB of memory. We've been using RAID 5 for many years. The new RAID 10 should give us a major boost in performance for our new document management system that will reside on the new server next year. It requires an external storage enclosure for the RAID because there are 12 drives. That along with the UPS and second battery puts us at 9 rack units and I only have 8 available on the old rack. I'm also going to get a nice slide-out keyboard and monitor in the new rack which should provide lots of expansion for years to come.

It wasn't as hard a sell as I thought it would be. The CFO, Controller and I had done a lot of research into document management systems and had a lot of ammunition for the review meeting. But all the CEO wanted to know was why we needed it, why we needed it now and what would happen if we didn't buy it now. We are running SQL Server 2000 and support for that product expires in January of 2008 so we are going to SQL Server 2005. Our old SQL Server is running on hardware that is no longer in warranty and coincidentally, one of the drives in the array failed just this morning. We are getting server 2003 with software assurance so we can upgrade to server 2008 next year when it comes out. If only I had software assurance for my other 10 servers. That's going to be a big capital expenditure next year along with Vista on all the workstations, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. I'm not convinced we need all that just yet. There just aren't enough compelling business advantages to drive the change.