Boss wants some updates done to the server

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DKirk

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Apr 26, 2013
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Alright, I'm the IT guy for a some collection company (about 15 employees). I'm fresh out of college and am rather knowledgeable but I'm not an expert who's been doing this for 25+ years.
Anyways, we have a HP ProLiant DL380G6 server, running 4 HDD's on a RAID1+0. Right now there's only about 50gig's worth of space left on them (Max capacity is only 300gig).
There are 4 more slots open in the hot swap. My boss wants me to find a way to increase are open disk space. Wants it as cheap as possible, and needs it done with minimal down time.
Most of my experience is dealing with RAID1 or 0 in a home environment. I've never really done anything like this on a business size scale. Need any suggestions you guys can give me please!
 
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USAFRet
Minimal budget, no real plan, a boss who is without clue.

You are in a no-win situation. If it goes wrong even a little, he will blame you forever.
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Rune Olsen

Rune Olsen

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Mar 27, 2013
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You will not get downtime on the Proliants when inserting new drives. I would consider creating a Raid 5 instead tho, more space efficient and way better performance. I think you should be able to convert the Raid on those controllers, insert bigger drives, rebuild the array. Then if you need more space later you can just toss the small old drives away and replace em

You might have to convert from Raid 1 to 0, then 5. Make sure you have backups and make sure your raid controller has sufficient amounts of RAM
 
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DKirk

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Apr 26, 2013
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I've been going through and clearing space. I've cleared up about 30 gigs so far. So if I got 4 larger drives, what's the exact process of going through and imaging the current drives onto the new ones?

The server uses 2.5" drives which are rather expensive. He's already throwing a fit about the prices. (honestly the company is not doing well right now and he's afraid to spend money). Our software vendor is trying to push him into building a whole new server, but again, money.

To top that all off my last day is May 10th and they've decided to not bring another IT guy in and just hire a consulting company. I told him to let the consulting company take charge of this project since they probably have more experience with it than I do. My boss seems to think this is a simple as slapping 4 new drives into the open hot swaps, rebooting the server and then it'll be good to go. He won't listen to me when I tell him it's not going to work like that.

Sorry I went a little off topic there, just trying to explain my situation a little better. The TLDR version is he's not very tech-savy at all and refuses to have any sort of a budget for any IT related items.
 
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DKirk

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Apr 26, 2013
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Thanks. I'll start looking into this approach.

 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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You're leaving in two weeks. Let him and the consulting company deal with it.
 
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Jim_L9

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RAID 10 actually has quite good performance, but it wastes disk space. If performance is important don't go from RAID 10 to RAID 5. If storage space is more important then RAID 5 makes sense. What operating system is on that server?
 
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DKirk

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That's my mentality. I was just hoping that if this was a minimal effort project that I could get it done and walk away with the experience of doing it. Know what I mean?
 
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DKirk

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Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Also, consider this. If it goes wrong, he may well sue you. Especially as you will be an ex-employee.

"The system was working perfectly until he screwed it up!"
Loss of business, deliberate destruction of company assets, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, you'd probably 'win'. But only after an expensive defense.

Collection agencies and their bosses are not known for being nice guys...
 
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DKirk

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Yep. It's getting outsourced to the consulting company now, lol. He has very unrealistic goals about everything. I like my job, mainly because I get paid to play on the internet and chat with software vendors on the phone, but I'm not learning anything by being the only IT guy here. I don't have enough field experience yet to be flying solo. My new job, which is actually in Arizona (I'm in Michigan now) is a team of around 25 IT techs so I'm pretty excited about that.
 
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popatim

popatim

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you have 4 open drive slots. Install 4 larger drives and set them up in a raid 10 and then copy the old raid10 data to the new one. When you're done remove the 4 old drives. From here you can install 4 more of the same drives, now or later, to expand the existing raid or you can use this same method to upgrade the drives again when they need it.

Just make sure you have current backups before you start and actually know how to restore them should something go wrong.
 
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