I’ve talked previously about management tools. I don’t think we’ll see a unified “one tool fits all” solution. However in the meantime I think there are some things we can do;

So, ECC, huge product, lots of features. What happens if you want to do a little configuration work but don’t want to deploy an [...]

I’ve been wrestling with a couple of architecture issues over the last few weeks. They are interlinked; but stand alone as separate issues.

First is three datacentre. So imagine a scenario where there is a normal datacentre pair, reasonably close to each other. New rules require another datacentre some distance away, which will be out [...]

Right, I’ve got Device Manager 5 installed pending installation of Tuning Manager 5. Agreed, the layout looks better (shame it is all still Java, my least programming tool). Now I need to generate some data. But yes it looks better.

Old JWT at DrunkenData seems to think www.storagerevolution.com is still alive. Here’s his [...]

My Tuning Manager issues go on; there’s obviously a problem with the version I’m using – reports don’t work correctly even after the re-install. However one, small side effect, I picked up the wrong subsystems to monitor after a reboot of the TM server. This was because I didn’t follow the instructions and ensure that [...]

Tuning Manager didn’t work properly. I needed to re-install it. Unfortunately I got into an infinite loop. The uninstall process requested I start one of the Tuning Manager services, when I did and tried again, the uninstall failed asking me to stop all services…whoa.

So, strategically thinking, where should backup be virtualised? There are virtualising [...]

I’ve done more work on Tuning Manager today and added a number of systems for collection. I’m not keen on the interface (currently using version 4.1) and so will be getting version 5.0 installed quickly. The proof of the pudding will be in the information I get out of the product. I’ll give [...]

So, I checked it out. The official position is not clear. There’s no direct support under VMware ESX, but some components are supported (things like the fibre channel agent etc) but a lot of stuff won’t be considered until ESX 3.0. Still waiting for clarification.

I’ve also been looking at USP configurations on two fronts; [...]

Been thinking about oversubscription and port usage. I suspect most SANs are seriously underutilising their available bandwidth. Oversubscription is therefore a good thing – but it will be dependent on being able to use that oversubscription. Cisco switches (gen2) allow oversubscription at the port group level. On a 48-port card this is per group of [...]

A while back I talked about the size increase in hard disk drives. We see disks growing at Moore’s Law rates, predicting a doubling of size every 18 months to 2 years. EMC proclaim a petabyte of storage within a single storage subsystem. But what does that actually mean?

Imagine an average page [...]

One aspect of storage design must consider the issues of resilience. All infrastructure components are subject to failure; even five 9′s of reliability means an outage of just over 5 minutes per year. How do we plan for that?

Multipathing

This is a simple one; two or more entire fabrics connecting hosts to [...]