I think it's about time dk specs him 10 million quid worth of kit, just so we can go the whole hog
I was just about to send a kit list to the pre-sales boys for them to spec up and price in the morning, might not bother now as i have some competition
I was just gonna suggest a checkpoint clustered firewall, 2 HP c7000 blade chassis's for redundancy running a flex fabric domain, with a 3PAR v800 8 node SAN with around 800x 600gb disks (important to have room for growth), then some Nexus 5000 switches for the FCOE, multi-vlan routing and VSANs etc.
Then i was going to suggest hosting it in somewhere like Telecity in Acton to make sure it has decent uptime and security, then maybe a 1gb line in to handle the internet and VMware View clients working from home.
Am i thinking too big? I was going for a normal 42U rack with no water cooling, so i didn't think i'd be going OTT at all?
I'd probably slap on some 6hr CTR mission critical support for it all too though and a managed offsite backup facility, just to b e sure.
Let me know if you like, and i'll bang a quote together