I’ve eliminated one vendor, who I still need to call (where did the time go?). They offered a great product, but we just weren’t comfortable enough with it.

Sunil Pareenja, our VP of Finance, has been working on the legal and financial aspects of the deal since Tuesday. Agreements are getting hammered out and product features and TCOs are being normalized so we have a more apples to apples comparison of the remaining products.

To incorporate a SAN and a new DB tier, I spent a lot of time on Wednesday discussing architectural changes to our existing cluster infrastructure with the rest of the technical team. The interesting news out of the conversation is that we didn’t need to change much. Our clusters are already designed to scale fairly large.  We ended up changing a few things with the cluster design to help allow the Cluster Support Engineers to support them a little easier, but it’s not a radical re-design. I’ll be posting more soon.

The technical team met with 2 of the 3 remaining SAN vendors today. We’re meeting with the third one on Friday.

Special thanks to Extreme Networks for sending one of their Network Engineers up to Sacramento for 2 days to work with us. I think he’s acquired more SAN knowledge than he ever wanted to.

I also had lunch with Hitachi Data Systems today. They claim to have a DMX killer. Looks compelling and I’m taking a further look. I’ve asked for a rough quote and some technical documentation to read over the weekend. I don’t know if we’ll include them this late in the game though, it will have to be VERY compelling.

And I’m also closing off a side conversation I’ve been having with Left Hand Networks, who has recently been acquired by HP. They offer an interesting product and they have a downloadable VMWare storage appliance to test out their software. It’s pretty slick, but my gut tells me they may be a little too ahead of the curve for us atm. If this project was running slower, I’d love to have tested their software beyond my laptop.

-Edward Muller

P.S. A few pics once I sync up my camera.