50Micron.com

Ok, I’ve heard the term “Vendor Abuse” before.  I always discounted it as whiny vendors who think that customers should just hand them sales without any actual work.

Apparently, I was wrong.

I’ve now seen it first hand.

Don’t believe me?  Here are a few examples:

Scenario One

Two days before thanksgiving, Mr. Customer says they’ve got a project going that’s going to require, quite literally, millions of dollars in storage.  The sales team gives up their thanksgiving weekend, in fact one of them working on it WHILE AT TABLE EATING TURKEY.

First thing monday morning following the holiday they present to the customer what amounts to 20-30 man-hours of work, only to be told that the project is no longer funded.

(This happens often enough to be commonplace)

Scenario Two

Mr. Customer sits in a meeting with the vendor and his management and throws random comments that have no bearing on the discussion at hand, accuses the sales team of being outright incompetent (they weren’t, I was in this same meeting) and storms out of the room ranting about sending all business to another vendor.

Scenario Three

At 2pm on Friday afternoon Mr Customer fires off yet another request for a ‘ballpark estimate’ for 5 Petabytes of data storage.  With a “P”.

When the vendor asks for specifics about the storage, IE, type of data, access speeds, rates, replication, access method, this customer accuses them of stalling and not being responsive.  After a long weekend, all questions answered, vendor is then told that the business went to a third party.

(When pressed, vendor finds that there never was a project to go along with this quote)

A few tips to stop this type of abuse:

1. Make sure all communications are CC’d above the troublemaker’s head.  Make sure the troublemaker knows this is happening.

2. And this is hard for a sales-person to do, once you’ve identified a truly abusive customer, don’t take their calls.  The one in the above scenarios likes to consume people’s time, but in the past six months has not ordered anything of significance.  If the abusive customer is causing you to miss deadlines with other customers, kick them to the curb.

3. Push the abusive customer off to a reseller if you can.  I’ve heard CDW-G can take LOADS of abuse.

4. Ask if this is a budgetary quote or if this is for a committed project.  If it’s for a committed project the customer should be able to provide specifics.  If it’s a quote for budgeting reasons, it can be back-burnered until “real” sales work is done.

I’m going to do (have done) the one thing you’re never supposed to do when you have an established online presence..

I’m moving the blog.

Nothing major, but i’ve decided that I’m going to re-dedicate ’50micron.com’ to an actual business site, in a shameless fit of self-promotion.

I’m leaving the original content pages where they are for the moment as well until the RSS feeds move (for all 4 of you that actually feel it necessary to follow my inane ramblings that closely) 

Then – stay tuned for the redesign.

Ok, given the changes to the storage arena I’ve been working on a revised “Tiering system” to incorporate all of the levels of data…importance?

My version of Storage Tiering is (or should be) as follows:

• Tier-1    – Symmetrix/Replicated – High Performance/Criticial Data
• Tier-2    – Symmetrix/NonReplicated – High Performance/Non-Criticial Data
• Tier-3   – Symmetrix/SATA/Replicated – High-Medium Performance/Critical Data
• Tier-4   – Symmetrix/SATA/NonReplicated – High-Medium Performance/Non-Critical Data
• Tier-5    – Clariion/FC/Replicated – Medium Performance/Critical Data
• Tier-6    – Clariion/FC/NonReplicated – Medium Performance/Non-Critical Data
• Tier-7    – Clariion/SATA/Replicated – Low Performance/Critical Data
• Tier-8    – Clariion/SATA/NonReplicated – Low Performance/Non-Critical Data
• Tier-9    – CelerraNAS/Replicated – Network Attached/Critical Data
• Tier-10  – CelerraNAS/NonReplicated – Network Attached/Non-Criticial Data
• Tier-11  – Atmos – Network Attached / Low Performance
• Tier-12  – Centerra (Content Addressable Storage) – Low Performance Archive / Highly Available
• Tier-13  – Primary Tape-In-Library (Automatic loading on demand via HSM)
• Tier-14  – Primary Tape-Out-Of-Library (Manual Intervention Required)

“Critical Data” vs. “Non-Critical Data” is simply a matter of how long you can be without the data should a failure or accidental deletion occur.  As all data is available in Tier8/9 storage (in theory).

I’ve also considered using Tier1/Tier1B to describe DMX storage vs. Clariion storage, given that there is a LOT of overlap in performance characteristics these days…

Oh, and iSCSI would be somewhere between 10 and 13….

Any thoughts?

Well – it’s been interesting.  if i’ve been remiss in my postings of late it’s because I haven’t had time to scratch, let alone actually spend any time working on non-work stuff… (Which, sadly, this qualifies as since no-one is paying me to do this)

It’s in – it’s up – it’s running.  After literally years of working at getting one, I finally have a *REAL* Clariion running in my basement-come-datacenter.  As an added bonus I now have a Celerra running in here as well.

The Clariion I ended up with started out life as an NS502 with 15x 73G Fibrechannel drives and 15x 500G SATA drives, for an almost 8 TB of storage.   Now some clever ebaying got me 10 146G FC drives to upgrade the non-vault drives so now I’m almost 9TB of storage.

It was a fun project.  It took a bit longer than I expected (silly me, shoulda known) and didn’t go exactly as I’d planned (also shoulda known.)

Started with the rack.  Had to get the PowerVault 660F out.  So I put the ESX servers in stand-by, vmotioned everything to one server, powered it off an moved it to my happy bakers rack in the corner.

The old PV660F That I used to run.

So I took it out, direct attached the PowerVault to one ESX server and ran the site off it for about a week while I rebuilt the rack.  (You’ll know when this happened, because if you went to the site during this time it probably just finished loading)

The new system started out as an NS502, which as some will know is a Celerra with a “captured” Clariion CX500 back-end.

Well I have nothing against captivity as a practice, but if I’m going to run a SAN in my house it’s damned sure going to be a SAN, not some NAS pretending it’s a SAN. (I believe my thoughts on iSCSI are fairly well known?)

So a few things I learned.  The NS502 boxes rarely get upgraded beyond the code they ship with, because most customers are of the ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ mentality. (Which in some ways I approve of)

I learned that when you update the Clariion FLARE code from FLARE19 to FLARE26, you *WILL* kill the attached Celerra unless it was updated ahead of time.

I also learned that you can’t simply replace the bank-end cables (between the celerra and ‘captured’ clariion) with fibre SFP’s and hooke cables up to the switch.  I’m not entirely sure why, but the optical SFP’s I connected caused the Storage Processors to hang on boot.  The SP would boot fine with them not in place, and then continue to function perfectly when they were plugged in after the fact, but they would not boot.  So I replaced the Optical SFP’s and cables with copper SFP–>SFP cables, and lo-and-behold everything works.

The "Finished" Product

Long story short, zone the switch, install the Celerra, and it’s now a CX500 with an NS502G attached, and my 3-node VMWare ESX cluster works fine and dandy on the pair of 500G luns I provisioned for it on the 146G FibreChannel drives 8+1 Raid-5 because speed isn’t really an issue.  The SATA drives were carved into two 6+1 raid-groups with a hotspare and provisioned almost entirely to the Celerra – I kept two 500G luns in reserve in case I should need to move the ESX storage off the 146G drives for any reason.

Now the cool part.  The webcontent for this (and other) sites is on the Celerra, NFS mounted to this server.  I have SnapSure enabled keeping 30 days of checkpoints in case I should manage to delete something important and forget about it for weeks at a time.  The content (MySQL database) is still on the VMWare virtual disks, I’m not sure how moving the database to NAS as well would affect the site, and as I’m not horrifically short on space I’m not horribly worried about it.

So there we are.  Now all I need is a place to replicate and a government grant to help pay for power and all will be good.