I have an aged storage array in a critical roll on my network. I have wanted to replace it for years, but the expense and the effort always kept it in the future. Apart from the speed being underwhelming, it has always been reliable and problem free.  My recent backup problems have necessitated a new and much larger backup destination.  This created the perfect storm allowing me to buy a huge new NAS to take over the rolls of my current slowpoke.  Thus freeing my old, slow, but reliable array to act as solely a backup.  This will breath new life and impressive capacity to my infrastructure and finally for the foreseeable future put an end to my local backup capacity issues.

Some of the preparations involve typology changes.  Changing the very roadways and turnpikes of my network. If you are doing a performance upgrade, might as well squeeze out all the juice (link aggregation, etc).  This upgrade is so big it will probably take the entire weekend just to prepare and rest of the month to complete!  what could possibly go wrong?  I prefer to think of all the things that will go right when it’s done.