50Micron.com

So it took me about 4 hours to actually get the set-up right.  I’ve never done a SANCopy implementation myself, because I was never on the Clariion side of things.  I feel like the Clariion is to the Symmetrix what the Chevy Vega was to the Camaro.  (Yes it has wheels and an engine, but the similarity ends there)

So about 18 hours to replicate 150G in my test-migration.  Not as good as I would like, and far less than SRDF, but it works.  It did say that SANCopy does much better when it’s reading from the remote and writing to the local, because writes actually use 4 transactions where reads use two, or something along those lines.

I’ve been able to mount the drives on the remote host, so I think we’re good to go.  I’m going to move the first of the clusters on Tuesday to see how things go.  I’ve got two “non-production” clusters to move, then I’ll move Exchange and then our big production applications.  (The ones that require executive clearance to take down for an hour)

I have to say the set-up is not one of the more intuitive applciations I’ve used, the documentation sucks and the only way I was able to get everything I needed was to bounce back and forth between three different manuals.

Oh well, I didn’t expect it would be painless.  Still less pain than having to pay someone else to do it.  We haven’t really spent a dime in PS since I came on-board, (I mean beyond the 75K that was in the deal that was signed and sealed before I came on board, we haven’t used any of that yet – I’m saving it for the SRDF-A implementation.)

The boys over at Symantec (www.symantec.com) just came by last week and gave us an interesting presentation on Enterprise Vault.  (Not to be confused with the Vault extension for NetBackup, which is a different beast)

The short answer is this.  EV is an application that dives into your exchange environment and strips out any email/attachments over (x) days old.  It then creates an HTML view copy of it and stores the original out of the Exchange information store in Tier-2 storage.  Then, after an even longer period, say a couple of years or so, you can even stage it from Tier-2 (say slow disks like Clariion ATA) to Tier-3 (Tape) storage.

The cool part is, that there is a header file that stays in the user’s email that shows that it’s a vaulted email.  If they double click to open it like the would a normal email, it figures out where it is, and if it’s in Tier-2 storage it brings it up, if it’s in Tier-3 storage, it sends a tape request to the appropriate person so the tape can be recalled from off-site storage and restored.

For companies that have to retain data for 20+ years, how bloated can an email infrastructure get?  I’ve got 90G in my information store after the first year, and it’s only going to get worse from this point on.

Though I’ll bet EMC is frothing at the mouth at the idea.

Well, after two days of serious work getting the cabling and power ready, EMC came out and spun up the Symm today.

Hot damn!  Finally some real storage and I can start planning the migration off the stupid Clariion.

One down-side though, the Multiprotocol cards they shipped were the wrong type, since we have an M2 model DMX, the RDF cards were apparently shipped for an M1.

I have a question for anyone bored enough to be reading this.

Can anyone see any reason why 62.5micron fibre is used?  There is no signal-to-noise difference that I can see, and the range is not quite as long as the 50micron.  Our Network guy swears by the 62.5 and I keep telling him he’s on crack. 

However, thanks to the fact that he’s the one that designed the infrastructure, the links that go from the new datacenter to the old are all 62.5, and now I’m waiting on CDW to overnight me 6 new 10meter 62.5 micron cables to hook the new SAN into the old SAN so I can get the clariion migrated.

Always an adventure.