I have always been a proponent of usings Blades in the SMB along with virtualization to reduce costs for the SMB. But what do you do for storage? Well the most common thing people look at is iSCSI vs FC. Usually people end up going the iSCSI route due to it’s lower cost factor.

Well another thing you can look at is direct attached storage. HP offers something called Direct Connect SAS storage for their HP BladeSystem. This can give you up to 420 TB of zoned or up to 192 TB of shared storage. This can be an attractive alternative for the SMB.

The way it works is by use of controllers installed in the blade severs along with blade switch interconnects and then finally either an MSA2000sa for shared storage or an MDS600 for direct attached storage. You can read more about the solution from HP here.

-RP

PlateSpin Recon is owned by Novell, and they have a great product on their hands. With PlateSpin Recon you can analyze all the servers in your environment and track them over an extended period of time. Then after you have collected the data you can go through planning stages with the program to determine what type of hardware and how much hardware you will need to virtualize to.

A product like this can save you tons of money. Novell offers a free trial of the software on their web site. I recently had a chance to use it and have to say that I love the product. It provides valuable statistical analysis data during huge consolidation projects and really takes the guesswork out of all of it.

This will allow you to make sound decisions on factual data when placing your virtual machines. You can find out more about this great product here.

-RP