Today EMC has released more information about something shown at EMC World called EMC ProtectPoint.  This new data protection offering brings direct backup from the VMAX3 to DataDomain.  In today’s work when a backup is kicked started data has to slow from the storage array to the application server.  This data then flows to the backup servers before being written to its final backup target.    Wouldn’t it be nice to cut out this middle man and write directly from the VMAX to DataDomain?   EMC ProtectPoint does just that.  This new offering will have native support for Oracle at GA, but I’m expecting this to grow quickly.  This will allow an Oracle DBA to use an RMAN directed backup to provide an extremely rapid and non-impactful backup.  The database will be put into hot backup mode.  Once complete, the VMAX data services layer will create SnapVX copies of the data LUNs.  After that completed the DB isRead More →

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EMC has unveiled its new message of Powerful, Trusted Agile at this redefined event today. Along with that comes the next generation VMAX hardware, the VMAX3. With this newest revision of EMC’s flagship product they look to bring the trust, and control of Centralized IT together with the cost, agility, and scale of modern Self Service IT. This release brings us three new hardware models: 100k, 200k, and 400k. Each of the new models are built on a single new architecture designed for hybrid cloud scale. This includes a new Operating System named Hypermax and a major overhaul of the virtual matrix. The RapidIO Virtual Matrix has been replaced with a 56GB/s Infiniband Dynamic Virtual Matrix.  What do they mean by dynamic? This new design allows for the vertical and horizontal movement of CPU resources inside the array.  CPU resources are divided into three groups or pools: front end host access, back in storage access, and dataRead More →

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In my last post I covered some settings to ensure you get the best performance from your XtremIO when running an Oracle workload.  When running any type of workload on XtremIO it’s a given that it will perform well, but what about helping us manage capacity as well? XtremIO offers inline deduplication, which we can leverage to save capacity without sacrificing performance. Any lun created on XtremIO will be thin provisioned at a 4k-granularity level.  That’s all well a good, but we know Oracle and thin provisioning aren’t exactly best friends so this won’t buy us a lot. XtremIO, however, does have an inline global deduplication that we can leverage to our benefit. Like thin provisioning this feature also operates at a 4k-granularity.  What that’s means is only unique 4k blocks consume physical capacity. How can we best use that to our benefit? The short answer is multiple copies of the same data. These copies can beRead More →

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XtremIO is EMC’s all-flash scale out storage array designed to delivery the full performance of flash. The array is designed for 4k random I/O, low latency, inline data reduction, and even distribution of data blocks.  This even distribution of data blocks leads to maximum performance and minimal flash wear.  You can find all sorts of information on the architecture of the array, but I haven’t seen much talking about archive maximum performance from an Oracle database on XtremIO. The nature of XtremIO ensures that’s any Oracle workload (OLTP, DSS, or Hybrid) will have high performance and low latency, however we can maximize performance with some configuration options.  Most of what I’ll be talking about is around RAC and ASM on Redhat Linux 6.x in a Fiber Channel Storage Area Network. A single XtremIO X-Brick has two storage controllers. Each storage controller has two fiber channel ports. Best practices are two have two HBAs in your host andRead More →

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With the announcement of ViPR 2.0 EMC is bringing some improvements and new features to EMC’s Software Defined Storage Software offering. The new and improved ViPR has major steps towards supporting a geo-distributed datacenter.  For object storage your multi-site geo-replicated ViPR environment will now be presented as a single global namespace.  The world of Active/Active writes is supported with strong consistency using a distributed erasure coding system, so you no longer have to choose between performance and redundancy.  Objects are now cut into chucks and stored in containers, this type of hybrid encoding allows for a very low storage overhead.  To allow for WAN optimized geo-disperse active/active traffic, ViPR looks for access patents and uses this information to accelerate the process. Object access is done via S3, Swift, or the Atmos API.  Another change in the object space brings the Centera API as ViPR CAS.  Today ViPR only supports the API, but a future release will allowRead More →

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If you’ve read my last Smart Zoning post on Cisco Smart Zoning you should have a good understanding of the how and why of Smart Zoning.  Shortly after that post I being the process of converting two SAN Fabrics from traditional zoning to Smart Zoning.  Cisco has an easy way to convert your traditional zones to a Smart Zone.  The base requirement for doing this is what you have Smart Zoning enabled.  It’s a simply process. # conf t (config)# zone smart-zone enable vsan 100 Smart Zoning distribution initiated. Check zone status. (config)# zone convert smart-zone vsan 100 (config)# zoneset activate name ZoneSet_VSAN100 vsan 100 It’s a simply process, right? All this does it query the FCNS database and marks each Zone Member as either init, target, or both. That is all well and good, but you still have exactly the same number of zones. The whole point of Smart Zoning is to reduce the management complexity byRead More →

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This morning I found myself needing to know what server was attached to each and every port on a large Cisco SAN Fabric. This can be quite the effort if you don’t have excellent documentation.  You can query the fabric login (flogi) database, but that will map a fiber channel port to a wwn.  That’s a start, but unless you have a map of wwn to server, it’s largely ineffective at proving human consumable information.   mds9513# show flogi database ——————————————————————————– INTERFACE VSAN FCID PORT NAME NODE NAME ——————————————————————————– fc1/1 301 0x8a00b0 50:00:09:72:08:3a:81:a7 50:00:09:72:06:3a:80:02 fc1/2 301 0x8a00cb 50:00:14:31:90:6a:79:12 50:00:14:40:45:32:6a:75 fc1/3 301 0x8a00ca 50:00:14:31:90:6a:54:12 50:00:14:40:45:32:6a:54 fc1/6 301 0x8a00cd 50:00:14:31:80:6a:54:02 50:00:14:40:45:22:6a:54 fc1/12 501 0xa50001 50:00:09:72:08:3a:61:e4 50:00:09:72:06:3a:82:00 If you want to see which zones map to the wwpn, you can use the “show zone member <wwn>” command to see a list of all zones associated with the specified wwn: mds9513# show zone member pwwn 10:00:00:00:c7:ca:3b:b8 pwwn 10:00:00:00:c7:ca:3b:b8 vsan 95 zoneRead More →

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For as long as most of us in the Fiber Channel space can recall SAN Zoning has been the base method of controlling access amongst SAN attached devices. A lot of us do this the classic Single Initiator / Single Target zoning – where one Host talks to one Array port.  In a Cisco SAN Fabric we have an easier way.  But first we need to understand why we do single initiator zoning. When a zone is created and an initiator/target pair added permissions are converted to an Access Control Lists (ACL) of Access Control Entities (ACE). The switch doesn’t care if the WWNs added are initiators or targets, its simply going to allow every WWN to talk to every other WWN in the zone. In our example 2 ACLs are created – one to allow the initiator to receive data from the target and another to allow the target to receive data from the initiator.  ThisRead More →

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SMB Change Notification is a concept that allows clients to keep up with file and directory changes.  The idea is to prevent clients from seeing stale content or having to constantly refresh their view. The server looks for changes to files/directories and, when detected, it sends a notification to the client to inform them of the change. Isilon supports three settings related to change notification.  The first of which, and also the default, is “All”.  With this settings Isilon will send unnecessary change notifications to far to many clients. Why?  If we take a look at a scenario where we have 300 users connecting to an Isilon share called “Applications”.  This share has a folder structure with a depth of 6 folders.  Lets say a user goes into the deepest folder, “Folder 6”, and changes a file on the share.  The server will notice the change and attempt to notify the clients.  When “All” is set allRead More →

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