VSPEX BLUE

The modern IT infrastructure is has become far more demanding that ever before. To meet that rising demand we have learned to be experts at “knob turning” to ensure peek performance.  We have implemented high performance, but rigid, systems in our attempt to keep up with the growing demand for great efficiency and agility.  All this effort we have exerted to turn complex rigid silos of compute and storage appear as a single optimized solution comes as a cost – lost time that could be spent in IT transformation.  The lack of simplicity can be countered by the use of Converged Infrastructure.   Until now EMC has been walking the edge of the infrastructure convergences market with its VSPEX reference architectures and it’s partnership with VCE. It has not, until now, offered it’s own converged infrastructure solution. Today EMC has announced its EVO:RAIL offering dubbed VXPEX BLUE.  With this all-in-one Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance EMC is hoping toRead More →

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In: Converged, EMCWorld

At Mega Launch this year EMC announce a product called ProtectPoint which stands ready to change the way we think about backups in the datacenter.  With modern data protection solutions we struggle to maintain a delicate balance between backup performance, data protection, and recoverability. This balance has left us with host intrusive and backend intensive data protection processes on complex and costly backup infrastructure.  Many companies have looked to snapshots technologies to help improve the speed at which they meet stringent protection requirements, but snapshots are not backups unless the data is copied to a secondary media.  A snapshot depends on the original data existing and being functional. That means if the primary storage were to become unavailable so does the snapshot.  That is a huge gap in recoverability. EMC ProtectPoint will help you bridge the gap between snapshot technologies and backup storage media by combining the performance of snapshots with the functionality of backups.  ProtectPoint accomplishedRead More →

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In: Backup

My passion, like many of you, has always been technology. It all started when my dad bought me my commodore VIC-20 when I was just 5 or 6 years old. I remember the using the external storage at the time, a Datasette. It was the first, of many, technological advances I’d see with magnetic tape and data storage in general. I guess I’ve come full circle now working in the world of Enterprise Storage and Backup for the past 15 years. We’ve seen a huge amount of change and advancement. From DASD to FICON to FAST the landscape is an ever involving one. Passion. It’s what drives us to explore new things, rise to challenges, and advance and support our environments. That passion is what excites us to share knowledge and absorb knowledge shared by other. That passion is what makes part of being EMC Elect special. To be grouped together with so many engaging export whoRead More →

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In: Speaking

The other day I was upgrading my Isilon cluster to 7.0.1.8.  Since I wanted to minimize customer impact I elected to do a rolling restart – something I’ve done several other times without problems.  Isilon has a feature in SmartConnect Advanced which allows the cluster to dynamically move IP addresses between nodes of the cluster.  What that means to my upgrade is when a node reboots, the IP address moves to a different node and my clients don’t notice the impact.   The entire upgrade process usually takes about 10 minutes per node. About three nodes into the rolling reboot, the node I was running the upgrade from, lost network connectivity in an unrelated problem. This stopped my upgrade process, leaving me running two different versions of OneFS.  The fix was actually pretty simple,  I had to restart my upgrade process.  In order to do that I had to stop the upgrade service which was already running onRead More →

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In: Storage

I was browsing the ECN Symmetrix Forum when I ran across this post where someone was asking for a summary of capacity allocated to each storage group – something you can easily get with ControlCenter or ProSphere but not with the SymCLI.  Don’t get me wrong, SymCLI cave give you the information just not in a nice easy command.  So I duh out a script to share.     You just run this script and specify the SID and watch it come back with a list of ever device allocated sorted by storage group. [code]LUN, SG, Pool, Size, Allocated, Written, Compressed Size, FAs 1424,TestSG1,SATA_R6,275.0,226,257.8,226.9,”FA-9E:1,FA-7E:1,FA-10E:1,FA-8E:1″ 0C77,TestSG1,SATA_R6,300.0,237,283.4,237.4,”FA-6E:1,FA-3E:1,FA-4E:1,FA-5E:1″ 0A4D,TestSG2,FC_R5,150.0,98,99.0,98.5,”FA-6E:1,FA-3E:1,FA-4E:1,FA-5E:1″ 0C60,TestSG2,FC_R5,100.0,6,50.8,6.1,”FA-6E:1,FA-3E:1,FA-4E:1,FA-5E:1″ 0A02,TestSG99,FC_R5,50.0,5,12.0,5.7,”FA-6E:1,FA-3E:1,FA-4E:1,FA-5E:1″ [/code] This can take a little while to run – but it’s easy for reporting allocations.Read More →

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In: Storage

One of the most annoying managements tasks of a Network Attached Storage is managing permissions for Windows files.  This is even further complicated using systems which allow for work Windows and Unix shares – Such as an EMC Isilon. If you haven’t picked it up by now,  i’m a command line guy with a strong unix background – so I don’t like using the windows GUI to control SMB permissions.  What I needed was really simple,  just to clone permissions (both unix and windows) from one file to another.  You can use setfacp/getfacl, but it’s kludgy and  deprecated in favor of ls/chmod.  So I came up with a simple perl script which can be ran on Isilon to clone permissions easily and quickly. As you can see in the example below permissions get cloned from <source> to <target>. [box]isilon-1# ls -led source -rwxrwx–x + 1 root wheel 1580 Mar 20 13:14 source OWNER: user:root GROUP: group:wheel CONTROL:dacl_auto_inherited,sacl_auto_inherited 0: user:DOMAINCincyStorageallow inherited file_gen_read,file_gen_write,file_gen_execute,std_write_dac,delete_child,inherited_aceRead More →

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In: Storage

This afternoon I was checking out my thin pool statistics when I noticed one of the pools had a significantly higher allocation usage than I was expecting.  I started digging into my documentation (I track every device created in a postgres database for tracking and trending) to see if a whole lot of devices we created over the weekend – and none were.  I started looking for an easy way to find bound luns that are not in a storage group – nothing!  I started to write my own shell script and the next thing you know I ended up with an inventory Perl script which tracks every meta device including lun id, thin pool, storage group, total thin allocation in Gb, and the FA ports they are bound to.   It’s simple enough to get with SMC but that is a lot of clicking.  So here it is! [box] ./inventory.pl lun_id,size,thin_pool,gb_alloc,%_alloc,gb_written,%_written,sg,FAs 11AA,200, 450gb_R5,97,49,95,48,StorageGroup,”FA-7F:0,FA-10F:0,FA-9F:0,FA-8F:0″ 2C2D,75, 2tb_R6,0,0,0,0,,””[/box] TheRead More →

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In: Storage

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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In: Storage

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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In: Storage

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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In: Storage