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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Someone on the Symmetrix Support Forums on the EMC Community Network was asking for a way to report on Tier Usage by Storage Group. That’s pretty simple and easy to see with the following command: [box]symfast -sid xxxx list -demand –association[/box] However that is raw output and even if output is XML it’s just not that easy to parse into Excel.  So I decide to write a quick perl script to parse the output and turn it into a CSV.   It’s fairly simple,  but you do need to edit the script to specify the name of all your tiers. That is done on line 15. [box]my @tiers = (‘R5_SSD’, ‘R5_FC’, ‘R6_SATA’); [/box] Each tier just needs to be added as an element to the array.  Then you just run the perl script passing the SID of the array in question and you’ll get a CSV showing the Storage Group, Demand, Usage, and Growth like this: [box]SG,Read More →

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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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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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