So I think we've come up with our shopping list after the 2 month evaluation period. I'll try to post some shots of us building the whole data center so y'all can pretend you're also working for one of the funnest (yeah that's a word) companies around. So here's what we're going to get...

Citrix NetScaler 9010

I know it seemed like we were leaning towards the Big-IP, but in truth our evaluation showed that both devices are equally good. The Big-IP has the advantage of being able to use iRules to do some pretty creative things at the site edge before it passes anything back to the servers. The NetScaler had the advantage of very trivial remote web logging setup, software that is very IOS-like and therefore would be easy to learn for any NetAdmin who knows Cisco, and very good word-of-mouth recommendations. This isn't taking anything away from the Big-IPs. I still like them and would recommend them to anyone.

Force10 C300

So I don't know that much about Force10 but I have had some experience administering Cisco 6500 series switches, which this thing presumably is competing against. They look the same, I'm sure the software is pretty similar too. I've heard anecdotal evidence that these outperform the Cisco's, but in reality, anything is going to be better than the POS Dell PowerConnect switches we are currently forced to use now. This C300 has 336 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet ports which is perfect for our phase 1 plans (about 60 hosts with 3 network interfaces in use). I'm a NetAdmin-in-training and I actually find it more enjoyable to work with network devices than systems so I really can't wait to get my grubby little paws on this bad boy.




3Par Inserv S400



So I've never heard of 3Par until our Ops lead joined the team. He used to work for 3Par a few years ago and it might seem like we're picking this product over the likes of NetApp, HDS, or EMC because of that reason...but after visiting 3Par's lab and having a few meetings with the other vendors it really became a no brainer decision. 3Par wasn't the cheapest solution, but in terms of performance, ease of use, and customer support they beat everyone else we checked out. This was actually the most controversial (although I use that term very lightly) item when we were discussing the data center project with the Engineering team. We currently have a very distributed, DAS (Direct Attached Storage) environment and it's understandable that they were a bit hesistant when we said that we could move away from all the local hard drives and just use centralize storage. From an administrative standpoint it's a no-brainer. From a performance standpoint, it took some convincing but in the end we all agreed that our systems would perform no lesser (and possibly better) with centralized storage. We'll use DAS for certain situations of course.




Sun Netra X4200


So we decided on Sun to host our site. It was between Sun and HP. Both are great systems (especially compared to Dell) but the clincher for us was remote management capabilities. HP's ILO is great, but would cost us an additional $300 per server to give us what Sun was including in the base price. The sun boxes are very well manufactured. At my last job I administered Linux on Dell PowerEdges for 5 years and the Sun just blew me away when it came to how it was engineered. The Netras will power all our front-end servers.

Sun Fire X4600


And the Fire will power our back-end servers and also host some VMs. This bad boy is the toy that still makes us all giddy like a school girl. Besides the fact that it has 8 dual-core Opterons (and is quad-core ready) and 32 GB of memory (up to 256 GB), it's the most well-engineered machine I've ever laid my hands on. It looks like a solid piece of metal and it feels like it too. We' re going to try running 16 instances of our front-end code (Apache / PHP) and benchmark it. I'll post more info on our results later.