To: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
cc: sipb-machine-room@MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: FY2K budget 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 29 Jul 1999 00:08:54 EDT."
             <199907290408.AAA00477@distraction.mit.edu> 
--------
>> Much earlier than I expected, I've been asked for a preliminary FY2K
>> server budget.  It's not a big deal if we don't have an exact list of
>> what we want to buy, but we really do need to start talking about
>> things.

	I haven't seen any discussion here yet about FY00 purchases yet,
so I figured I'd mention some of the thoughts I've had.  

	Among the AFS servers in the sipb cell, the oldest right now is
ronald-ann, which is an 85 Mhz sparc5 from FY96, and should probably be
replaced this year.  For the last server we replaced (reynelda), we
bought an Ultra 60, but I'm not convinced we need to purchase something
that expensive for our fileservers.  An Ultra 5 about 25% of the cost of
an Ultra60, and with a SCSI bus added, an Ultra5 should work just as
well.  Replacing ronald-ann with an Ultra5 with 18 gb disks for vice
partitions would cost about $6000; buying a similarly configured ultra60
would be about $12000-$13000.  I think we should buy an Ultra 5 to
replace ronald-ann.

	I'd also like to buy some new hardware for AFS backups this
year, since the current DLT drive is reasonably old and has conveniently
stopped working recently.  I'd like to buy a DLT tape stacker for AFS
backups this year, since if the cell only grows enough to fill most of
the disks currently in it, we'll need to start backing up onto multiple
tapes.  It would be nice to have some way of automating backups so
someone doesn't need to start them manually and swap tapes.
Additionally, having the stacker would give us the ability to more
easily do backups more often, or to start doing incremental backups of
the sipb cell.  I'd suggest we purchase an LXS from Overland Data, which
is what we're currently using for athena cell backups.  I'm attempting
to get a quote for one now, but when the Athena ones were purchased,
they cost about $10k.  

	If we purchase a DLT stacker, it would be best to have a
dedicated machine for it to live on.  Since it'll need to have AFS keys
to do automated backups, we won't want it to live in the office.  Since
it'll require much less manual attention, putting it in the machine room
shouldn't be a problem.  If we bought another Ultra 5 for it to live on,
it would be about $3000.   We'd also have the option of using one of the
fileservers or the old {ronald-ann,reynelda}.  I think buying a new
machine for it would be nice, and we could buy one and still save money
over buying a u60 fileserver, but buying a second ultra5 is the least
important purchase I've mentioned here.

	An estimate for the purchases here is somewhere between $15000
and $20000, depending on the exact quote I get from Overland Data for
the stacker and whether we decide to buy a second Ultra 5 or not.

Garry