At $work, we’ve been running very tight on disk space for a few months now. So tight that we’ve had to regularly drop data out of the tables and store it offline, in the hope that we can restore it later. Luckily it’s only mail transaction logs, but they’re still fairly important. I campaigned via my director to get something decent and scaleable in place – perhaps an IBM SAN component. Scales to multiple terabytes, supports multiple enclosures, hot swap everything and a fair chunk of redundancy.

It finally arrived on Friday – couriered straight from Germany by a courier company called HopHop. That had me laughing. Good thing I understand some basic (VERY basic) German, because the courier didn’t seem to speak English! The box was over 5 feet long, 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep – all this for a 4U rackmountable array? Turns out it was a bit of a Russian Doll box, containing 10 seperate hard drive boxes, 4 QLogic FC HBAs, 2 GBICs, 2 fibre patch cables and a partridge in a pear tree plenty of documentation. Probably weighed in at 80 kilos all told.