So I've been meeting most of my targets and have been fairly organised work wise and this has now come back and bitten me because I've been told that I need to go to a vendor presentation meeting tomorrow miles from the main office and that it starts at 09:00 SHARP! (There was emphasis on the sharp bit, it's not me doing it for effect).

So, it's a very early start, trapse across country to hear a salesweasel enthuse about something I really don't care about and don't even have much knowledge with. The only think I can do for my own amusement is think up awkward questions and see if he (because it's always a him, no sexy nible women to push the sale unfortunately) and enjoy the 'free' lunch.

In other news, very soon I should have 168TB of shiny SATA disk to play with. This is far in excess of what we really need but it'll help collapse 20 disk shelves of 72GB disks into just 3 disk shelves of 1TB SATA. I really, really love SATA disks and think of the improvement in sizes, 72GB which were state of the art 6 years ago to 1TB today. It's quite incredible.

The drawback here is that of spindles, more data on less spindles means that different people could cause the filer to fight over access to the data. This can be fairly easily mitigated by dividing the aggregates (the physical disks) in sections that will have specific usage patterns.
In many ways I'm looking forward to this project as it will really help consolidate a lot of the NetApp filer works I've been doing and provide a lot of room for growth.