50Micron.com

I did not stay up way too late upgrading (playing with) the new CX.

I did not accidentally plug my new CX into a consumer-grade UPS but accidentally plug it into the SURGE outlet and not the BATT outlet.

I did not plug it into the same wall circuit that the aux AC is on.

I did not plug it into the same wall circuit that the Brinks Security system is on.

I did *NOT* trip the circuit breaker thereby causing the house alarm to go off at almost midnight, waking the entire family and generating a new level of annoyed from my wife that I can’t remember seeing in the recent past.

And most importantly….I did not do all of this halfway through the DART load on the NS half of the box.

That’s gonna sting.

Anil Gupta had an interesting post on his blog that I found interesting:

Anil’s Blog Post

Included in his post was a peice of marketing fluff from Craig Nunes, VP Marketing at 3Par, about how great their arrays are.

Of course they are…especially if you are VP of their marketing department.  It’s there job to promote, therefore from an engineering standpoint anything they say should be taken with a grain of salt.

Truthfully I can’t say one way or another, because looking across a CoLo cage at one a few weeks ago was actually the first time I’ve ever SEEN a 3Par array.

It was pretty.

I tend to follow one rule when it comes to storage arrays:

The effectiveness of an array is inversely proportional to the count and speed of the blinking lights on the exterior of the array.

Any time I see lots of blinking lights I think to myself – what are those blinking lights covering for?

I offer as proof:

1.  Symmetrix – black box.  No blinking lights, very few lights at all on the exterior actually, and the ones on the interior are mostly covered up even when the doors are open.

2. Clariion – it’s been interesting to see the maturation of the Clariion product over the years.  The old FC (and IP) series had the typical blinking green lights on the outside, plus the amber lights for “Alert” statuses.  As the line has matured they’ve gone further and further away from the lights.  Note that the AX, being a lower-tier than the CX, has more lights on it.

3. Centerra – other than the activity lights on the network switch in the back of the cabinet, I’m hard pressed to know if these are powered on.

I’d offer more examples, but it’s 6pm and time for me to head home.

/Jg

There comes a time in every geek’s life….

A look of wonder crossing his face….

A new toy, a new project, a new endeavour….

A beloved wife saying something along the lines of “You bring that damned thing in here and I swear to god…”

This is one of those times.

Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be moving 50micron.com and it’s assorted supporting systems off of the “OLD” storage (the 8 year old Dell PowerVaults I’ve been running on) and moving to a brand new (for me) NS500..

Now a few things I plan on making happen.  This NS500 will become an NS500G and CX500, because there is no way in hell I’m going to continue to live with a captured back-end when there is so much fibrechannel storage to be had, just out of reach..  (No iSCSI in this household, period, end of discussion)

Almost 9TB of storage, between the rack of 73G drives (pictured, sitting on top of the NAS) and the rack of 500G SATA disks (not pictured, too heavy for the bakers rack it’s all sitting on right now.)

Ohboyohboyohboyohboy.  This is the kind of thing real geeks live for.

This started off as a comment to “A bail-out for little-old me?” But on careful consideration I think the subject warranted a post of it’s own.

If a company is experiencing a slow-down in sales, especially PS work suffers.  (Companies still need to buy the storage, but may be more likely to handle more of the installation/configuration themselves to save money) So what ends up happening is that the field-engineers will find themselves short on work first.

Most companies are loathe to give up their sales staff too early, simply because the only way they’re going to stay in business is to continue to try to sell.  They all think that when they book more work they can always re-hire their engineers.

Here is the problem with this theory – they act like we’re just sitting around on our thumbs waiting for their business to pick up.

No, we’re out hustling new work, and the smarter/better / more well known of us are getting new jobs, despite the down-turn.  So when their business DOES finally turn around (and it will, eventually) they’ll find the best and the brightest have locked in new engagements, and the ones that they have to choose from are the ones that haven’t found new work for a reason.

It’s reverse-Darwinism at work.  The company is forced to hire from what amounts to the bottom 50% of the people they laid off two or three months earlier.  They may save a few bucks, but their customer satisfaction numbers go through the floor.  I’ve been hearing customer-service complaint stories throughout this downturn, and they’ve gotten quite a lot louder in the past 6-8 weeks.

When the stockholders, most of whom couldn’t navigate their E-Trade account without help, start making technical decisions for a technical company, the end of the road is not far away.

Now I fully understand a company laying people off to keep from going under, but that’s what it should be.  A last ditch effort.

If you as a company are laying people off to protect profit margins and dividend payments, you are RESPONOSIBLE for the financial crisis we find ourselves in.

Mind you – I’m not targeting any particular organization with this story.  I’m sure Every Major Corporation has this problem.

For anyone new to the Cisco world, whether it be fibrechannel MDS switches or IOS Network switches.  Remember the three magic words:

‘copy run start’

Missed that on my home switch…apparently about 4 months and numerous vlan changes ago.  Today at about 10am we had a powerfailure, first one long enough to cause the rack to go dark.

When it came back up, no network.  Took me a while to realize that I had re-partitioned the switch a while ago and it didn’t stick.

so ‘copy run start’

Good night.

Good luck.

It’s like being strapped into the gurney with the I.V. line in your arm and getting the last minute phone-call from the governor.

This week the federal government bailed me and my little almost-a-real-company out.

Several years ago I worked for a particular federal client. Data migration, switch migration, cable remediation, and a number of other projects.

Apparently it went well because for years they’ve been trying to get me back in and it just came down the wire that I’ve just been awarded a 1-year contract to go in as their new storage admin.

So the company is saved, or at least has been granted a one-year stay of execution.

This was, in very large part, the reason I turned down the Pre-Sales gig I was offered last month, among others.  It’s also the reason the EMC Reseller that I was consulting through did a wonderful job keeping me on throughout the holidays, something I will always remember.  (As in – some day you’re going to come to me for a favor…. and I will grant this favor…) 

So wish me luck in my new endeavors.

I got sucked into this job, and the only benefit of it is that it’s in California, which, when it comes down to it is not a bad place to be when it’s snowing back home. Bygones.

Anyway, my job, whether I want to or not, is to figure out a way to move about 4 Terabytes of Celerra data from one set of disks (6+1 R5 -7.2KSATA) to newer, faster disks (4+1R5-15KFC)

And the rub is, that I have to do it online.

This is one of those places where I hate the celerra. Found this great primus article, (emc144545 if you’re interested) that states quite unequivocally that you can only use the back-end Clariion lun migration if you are migrating to an identical raid group, which to me, negates the reasoning for doing it in the first place.

Identical raid group. If it’s SATA, the target has to be SATA. If it’s 4+1 Raid-5 the target MUST be 4+1 Raid-5.

Near as I can figure, and this is not stated clearly in the article, that it has to do with how the Celerra builds it’s raid-pools. Since you USUALLY build filesystems and set them to expand into a raid-pool, my guess is that changing the make-up of the disks underneath the filesystem screws up the pool database.

Come on guys, this should be an easy fix. (This and the ability to easily shrink a filesystem would be nice) When a customer makes one of those mistakes, you know, buying the wrong disks from the outset because they’re focused on capacity and forget a little thing called performance, the hardware should offer an easy way to fix this.

In the case of the customer I’m working on now, Clariion LUN migration was out because of the disk-mark issue, the standard SecureCopy is out because minimal downtime is allowed.

Long and the short of it is I’m getting ready to do an internal CDMS migration. Now anyone who has used CDMS knows it’s not the fastest product in the world. You also know it can be maddening because one of the things you *STILL* can’t see is what percentage complete the migration is.

But as far as technology goes, the usefulness of it is awe inspiring.

CDMS is a “Copy-On-Access” file-level clone. Essentially it builds a duplicate I-Node table pointing to the old files, and presents this to the client. Browsing the new directory structure shows you all of the filesystem structure exactly as it is on the old source box. WHen you attempt the access a file for the first time, it then copies that file from the old filesystem to the new file system and then passes it to the end-client.

Now this is where it’s a pain. it’s a slow process, depending on the speed of the source system/network/etc you can increase your initial access time 20-fold. (subsequent accesses come from the new disks, so it’s a one-time-hit.)

So tomorrow, I start moving almost 4TB this way.  Running 32 threads internally (this is inter-Celerra migration) it should run fairly fast, depending on how fast the network stack can process it.

To EMC – fix the disk-mark database to allow a celerra lun to be migrated without peanalty (or at least with easy-to-moderate reconfiguration)  You’ll sell more disks because people won’t feel married to the disks they’ve got, or worry about committing to a disk-type if they’re not absolutely sure of the perofrmance numbers of it.

To all Sales people.  Don’t sell SATA disks for production-level applications.  They don’t work.  (see my next post, SATA, SAS, and Fibrechannel)