After seeing my Perl scripts for migrating from EMC Celerra to Isilon a few people have asked me how I moved my actually data from the source Celerra to my target Isilon. The answer is pretty simple: EMCOPY. EMCOPY is basically a fast version of robycopy used for moving data while maintain ACLs and permissions.. It’s CIFS/SMB centric and very easy to use. You run it from a windows machine with access to both shares and it copies data. I wrote a quick script to generate my EMCOPY commands based on my previous ones. Wanted to share that with everyone.     [box]Now it’s time for a short note and small disclaimer. This script works for me in my environment. Do your homework and make this work for you. While I have tried to make this robust and fully functional, it’s important to note “stuff happens”, this is still provides “as is” with no warranty whatsoever. UseRead More →

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I’ve been working on a massive migration from an EMC Celerra to our new shiny Isilon. We’ve got a ton of file systems, CIFS, and NFS shares which I don’t want to re-create manually. “Work Smarter, Not Harder” is what Scrooge McDuck always said, right? So I created a few simple Perl scripts to export information from the Celerra Control Station and created a shell script to run on Isilon to migrate the directories and shares. I’ve only tested with with 6.5 – not sure of the change in syntax in 7.x. This doesn’t actually move the data or the permissions, as that is a whole different project. It simply parses a “nas_fs” query to make directories, create a hard quota to mimic sizes, and then created the NFS and SMB share. It’s a set of three scripts that can be run as needed. [box]Now it’s time for a short note and small disclaimer. This script worksRead More →

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Everyone seems to be talking about EMC’s new private cloud collaboration offering Syncplicity.  And why shouldn’t they be, from everything I’ve seen it looks like a great offering if you are looking to allow corporate users to easily and safely access their files anywhere and on any device while keeping your data stored on your own datacenter.   The basic idea is simple and elegant. It allows you to offer a service where your users can sync and share files across all the various platforms.  How does it all work?  You have four basic elements: client access, authentication, application nodes, and storage. The storage part of this picture is what sets this apart from the dropboxes of the world. On-premises infrastructure.  Rather than pushing your data to an external provider you keep all your data on your own equipment in your datacenter. You’ve got two options for storing you’re files EMC Atoms and EMC Isilon. The secondRead More →

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As a storage administrator one of most boring tasks I have to do is making and allocating new storages to hosts.  To me it’s the equivalent of creating a user.  Easy to do, but very boring.  If you know me at all, which you probably don’t, you know I hate boring.  For a lot of people it’s just a few right clicks in SMC/Unisphere and you’ve got yourself a new LUN.   For me it’s a quick SSH into a server with SYMCLI, a few edits to files, a few commands, and bam. I’d rather spend my time working on future planning, new architecture, or almost anything else. I finally had enough free time to write some Perl code which parses a simple text file to create new Meta devices on an EMC VMAX array. Actually creating a new Meta device is a fairly simple thing: First you create the thin devices, then you combine them all togetherRead More →

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