Finally Friday

This has been a long week. My boss was away and gladly it was fairly quiet. My network guy was out at the beginning of the week and broke his foot last night so was out today too.
- fighting with moving backups off one of the backup to disk appliances so we can get rid of that physical unit. It has been a long road but we are finally where we need to be on backup storage, at least for now. Along the way it took a lot of acrobatics and some loaner equipment from the vendor. Once we get all the data off it we can return it. Most of the data "aged off" as designed, but some backup data we wanted to keep long term needed AUXCOPY'd off. This took all week and we had to reschedule moving the equipment until next week because it wasn't done.
- just finished paperwork for performance appraisal for our best guy. Once I review it with him next week I will be done with administrative BS for a while.
- speaking of administrative BS, our HR dept just forced all the managers to read a lame book and attend discussion sessions. It was what you might expect.
- Planning more for upcoming extranet work and it's starting to shape up to the point I actually think we can get it done and it will work. Got a design drawing done and listed off what we need to buy. still need to do a formal project plan.
- Scheduled weekly meetings with all my staff. I had tried to save time and frustration by just having a big group meeting with everyone there. This meeting is very helpful to everyone and we get actual work done in them. However, it didn't really accomplish the same thing as personally reviewing status with each one individually.
- spent some time talking with some guys from another firm like ours who aren't quite as far along as we are with Exchange 2007. I saw them on a list serve asking how well failover and failback worked with SCR replication. We had worked for a while under the delusion that we could fail back from an SCR failover. It was gratifying to help somebody out by sharing that wouldn't work, but I also got to compare notes about how they were doing VMWare and other stuff. I need to focus on "networking" in the social sense much more like this.
- got a bit done this week in the way of catching up and cleaning up. and left on time more days than usual.
- will need to begin planning for either adding tier2 storage or finding a way to age more stuff into tier 3. We aren't nearly in as bad a shape as we were at the beginning of the year. that was a true crisis, we came close to a disastrous situation. I've been summarizing and reporting free space weekly and have a much better handle on what we have in use. It is just going to be hard to push for adding 2 more trays of storage after already adding disk this year.