Supply of VM Storage Area Network

UKCEH runs on-premise data centres at each of the four sites, with services being virtualized on a Vmware Vsphere 6.7/7.0 platform.

The existing IBM V3700 storage area network (SAN) that holds the virtual machines (VMs) at each site is now approaching end of life and needs to be replaced.

These VMs provide the majority of general purpose IT services to the site (such as MS AD, SCCM, print) as well as a variety of web services both internally and externally to external partners/WWW.

The VSphere platform is hosted on Dell Poweredge servers, themselves recently replaced, so a hyperconverged host/storage solution is not an option at this time.

The existing VM SANs at each site are independent of each other, although there is a possibility that during the lifespan of the new SAN they could be linked, for example to provide VM DR between sites.

Storage services in UKCEH are run over 2 redundant fibre channel fabrics (8/16gbps).

Existing FC switches are a mixture of 8gbps IBM SAN24B-4 (Brocade 300) and 16gbps Lenovo B6505 (Brocade 6505).

Note: this VM SAN is complementary to a much larger SAN (out of the scope of this project) that provides bulk file services to the sites (including acting as a Veeam backup repository for VMs, itself then backed up to tape.)