Since I've started at Vassar, I've been given two major initiatives to work on.
The first was to completely revamp our backup system into something that is scalable and doesn't require the constant care and loving attention that our homebrew backups required. As of yesterday, the purchase order for Bakbone's NetVault was approved, putting that process firmly into the "deploy it" stage. NetVault is not, at all, a well known application. In fact, we almost blew them off because they're weren't a "big name" (Veritas, EMC Legato, Tivoli Storage Manager, for example), but in the end, after we "humored them" by having them come out (that's how we viewed it), we realized that their product was a 100% match for what I had drawn on my chalkboard on Day One as our "ideal world solution".
The second was to decide upon a new anti-spam regimen for the entire campus. After a couple false starts, we settled on IronPort's appliance at the edge. The purchase order for that was approved this morning. When we come back from break, the failover unit will arrive, and we'll begin deploying it in earnest.
The practical upshot of all of this is that I feel really goddamned good about getting some of these big projects mostly-completed, and am in good position to just take tomorrow and Thursday off as vacation days and finish up some non-work stuff before the holidays. (I have off from Friday through January 3rd already as holiday-time)
This is going to feel so good to relax for this long!
Why Ironport? We're mostly happy with Barracuda, but I'm always pondering alternatives.
Very nice.
The reason we chose Ironport is because we listened to a number of people who have tried both, and the executive summary always seemed to be "if cost is your primary concern, go Barracuda. If getting the job done and done right is your primary concern, go Ironport."
One thing I'm gonna miss about Education. Long vacation times around this part of the year.
Hmm.. I know it's too late but we love "Postini." Postini scans all email for viruses and determines if it's spam for every user in the company. It provides cool web-based stats you can show management to validate your investment. It would be a pain though, to add/delete a few hundred users every semester though.