Ilja Coolen \ ICSS

About a week ago I finally got my home NAS device, a “QNAP TS 439 II Pro“.

I have been postponing this purchase for years now since I had my own home brew Linux server acting as a NAS station. I only decided to phase out the Linux server in favour for the small NAS box because after 10 years always-on usage, my Linux server began to have some stability issues.

For me the new NAS device had to be able to support all features I was using on my Linux server. More features were nice, but not required.

• Replicate personal data on regular intervals, like digital photos and scanned documents.
• Replicate backups from my website and database (along with the website of a couple of friends) to the NAS box.
• Serve multimedia content using uPnP/DLNA to the media players in my house. Transcoding not required.
• Download podcasts on regular intervals.
• Download other content like TV shows and or movies.
• Serve as a surveillance station for a webcam or maybe even two eventually.
• Have fairly good performance.

Like Synology, QNAP has several models that support all of these features. Maybe not all of them out-of-the-box, but they can all be implemented in some way. Besides what I wanted it to support, the QNAP has a bunch more features you can use. I went for the QNAP based on various posts I read on the web and features the do offer. In the end I do not think it would have made much difference. Pricing is however somewhat higher for the Synology boxes with 4 or more drives (as far as I have been able to investigate).

Unboxing:

The QNAP came in a nice cardboard box with sufficient soft protection to make sure your box can sit in your cabinet or on your desk without dents or scratches. Like most other products, there is nothing wrong with the packaging. When you order your gear at a webshop, make sure you check a couple of reviews on that shop to make sure they send their orders in decent and discrete packaging.
I tend to order at the same webshop most of the time, because I know them and am very satisfied with their services. I know it sometimes can be somewhat cheaper, but that is not my most important criteria.

Within the box, there is also a smaller box with the power and network cables. Yes more than one network cable, as this QNAP model has a dual 1GbE interface. Also you will find a small plastic wrapping with the necessary screws to secure your hard drives in the brackets. For those who care to use it, there is also a CDrom with all the user documentation you need. In my case, these mostly end up in the bin.

External appearance:

From the outside the box has a decent and firm look. The surrounding cover is made up out of brushed aluminium and seems to have a clear coating over the metal. I guess it helps keeping the box clear of smudges. At the front is a small but very bright blue LCD panel indicating the IP address and status. After running a few minutes this display dims and only a couple of subtle LED’s are lit to indicate activity and system status.

The front cover is clearly a plastic cover and it also feels that way. This to me kind of seems disappointing in comparison to the side and top covers. The drive brackets are also made of plastic but have a metal cage to place either a 2.5″ HDD or 3.5″ HDD in.

The option of a 2.5″ or 3.5″ contributes to user flexibility but also has the SMB market in mind. I myself will be quite satisfied with the slower but larger capacity drives, but some businesses or high end users might have more need for faster or “greener” 2.5″ drives. It’s up to you, QNAP offers the possibility to go either way.

Be on the lookout for some follow up posts.

A short while ago, HP had announced the data center in a container.

Like the project BlackBox (Modular Data Center) from Oracle/SUN it is a cool concept. The approach might seem a bit similar. Stick a bunch of computers and infrastructure in a movable container (not mobile in the sense you pick it up and move it somewhere else very easily) and try to sell it as a modular concept to customers.
In both HP and Oracle/SUN’s case, there a couple of use cases for equipment like this. Rapid (unexpected) growth, temporary large scale projects (like render farms) are mentioned as use case the most. Disaster recovery might also be an option, but I would expect nobody is willing to flash the creditcard for a “spare” container of this kind.

At the HP Media Event in Barcelona I’ve heard people talk about a scenario where you would not be getting any new building permits for expanding/extending your current data center complex, and this type of PODs would be a good way of providing a work-around for this problem.  So there’s plenty of use cases here. All you need is “Water, Power and a big wallet”.

The one thing I am sure of is the philosophy HP has in creating this POD is way different than the Oracle/SUN Modular Datacenter.  HP make it clear they want to change the way we are using our computing power. The want to be the Henry Ford of datacenter assembly. For those of you who have no clue what that means, check this link.
In essence, HP can assemble a server every 12 seconds and a multiple completely packed PODs within a few weeks. The time of waiting weeks or even months for your new equipment is over, or so HP says.  Whether or not they will have assembly line pricing is unclear, but this is not my arena, so I will make assumptions here.

Size matters

The POD will be available in two sizes,  20 feet ( approx 6 meters) long or 40 feet ( approx 12 meters) long. There will be 500 U’s or a 1000 U’s available you can fill up to your match your needs, as long as it is all standard 19″ rack mountable gear. But be sure to do some very thorough planning, because once equipped and delivered you will be stuck with it for some time. You can replace some bits and pieces here and there, like a broken server or switch, but that’s pretty much it. Part of the reason is that the complete POD will be cabled en designed to your needs, and the POD itself offers very little space to be squeezing in new cabling in anyway.

All the Barcelona attendees were able to visit the POD to get a real life experience. I was somewhat late and they already switched off the generator, so the POD was silent and lacking all the data center noise you all love. There was only half a rack filled with equipment, because it was just about demonstrating the concept so it wouldn’t have been all that fun for me anyway. In the event area, there was a scale model though, which gave a pretty good impression. Just look at this picture here. It shows only servers, but like I said, you can put anything in there you want, as long as it fits into a standard 19″ rack with no more than about 40U’s of height. I have found some more than decent pictures at this “The ServerRoom’s ” Flickr page.

Besides the practical use of a POD, there is also the placement of one. Where are you going to put it when you are in need of a POD?

If you put it in the parking lot of your company, you will need some additional security measures to make sure no one is paying your data center an unwanted visit. Besides this, there is also the exposure to the forces of nature. You will need to make sure your POD is able to survive harsh winters or extremely hot somers. You don’t want your POD to end up like this.
You might be better of putting the POD in a warehouse type of building if you happen to have such a place. Collocating with other PODders might be more convenient. Anyway, besides the use case of a POD or Modular Data Center you will still have to arrange the utilities required to place a POD. So not only the POD itself requires careful planning, but how and were to put a POD does as well. This is obviously true for all your data center activities.

I am looking forward to hearing about some real life use case examples, so please post a comment if you have a interesting case to report.

I have found a website listing a bunch of data center boxes. Some I’ve never even heard of. Just goes to show that HP and Oracle/SUN are  definitely not alone in this arena. A couple of links were outdated so I scraped some recent and working links together and put them below for you.

• HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD)
• SUN Modular Data Center (MD)
• SGI Ice Cube / Ecological Data Center
• IBM Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC)
• Bull Mobull
• APC Mobile Data Center / Datapod
• Sitronics Mobile Data Center

If you have some more vendors to add to this list, please do so. I will appreciate it.

You can comment here, or on twitter, whichever you prefer.

The last couple of days were a blast. It deserves a special note that the organisation of the “Seattle 2010 Tech Field Day” was
phenomenal. Everything was taken care of. The delegates had nothing to worry about, except maybe trying to look good on camera. After a while you actually didn’t notice the camera crew anymore and you wouldn’t worry about your appearance anymore.

We gathered at the Cedarbrook Lodge (which was a stunningly beautiful place to stay at actually) and had a welcoming dinner on Wednesday. This dinner was intended to get to know each other a bit better. There were a couple of newbies (like me) among the delegates, so this was quite a nice way to get introduced.

A shuttle bus took us from one conference location to the other. The schedule was tight, but given the live discussion we had during the sessions, this was actually a good thing, otherwise this conference would take a week. The locations were absolutely great. We get to spend some time at the “Microsoft Partner Center” two days in a row, and we went to the Microsoft on campus shop. Some of you who know me, would probably think “what the heck is he doing in a Microsoft shop”, but I would actually have bought a outdoor type jacket. The dumb thing however was, there was no clothing in my size. Most of the stuff was in 2XL to 6XL (US size charts), were I am only an XL in the European size chart. This is somewhere like a US medium size . Hey, I am just saying….

We also visited the F5 Networks HQ, and the NEC America site in Seattle. We were welcomed and treated with much hospitality everywhere we went. NEC might not have the most fancy office interior, their presentation to me was actually one of the best. I can’t explain why exactly I feel like that, but I think it has something to do with the way Gideon Senderov (NEC Director, Product Management & Technical Marketing of Advanced Storage Products) showed his knowledge of the NEC gear we went to see. His in depth knowledge was absolutely astounding. I don’t mean to say the other vendor’s presenters didn’t know their stuff, the absolutely did, but Gideon rose way above them. NEC, like F5, Compellent, Veeam and NimbleStorage did some live demo’s on their gear. They made it all happen, not a single glitch. Another impression I had during the NEC session, was they were a bit more open and honest about what their gear could and could not do. Most other vendors try to avoid answering questions that lead to an answer that points out that their gear cannot do a specific thing. Mostly it’s not a big deal.

The launch of the Nimble Storage company and their product introduction was also a very great experience. I think it takes  courage to launch a product in front of a bunch of tech analysts and critics. But Nimble pulled it of just great, and the product made a great impression.

Looking back on those days, there is absolutely nothing negative to say about the organisation and effort that was put into this event by the organizers, Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett) and Claire Chaplais (@-I-Dont-Twitter) and the sponsors. It was a great experience and a big thank you is in order. It was great meeting you all and thank you for making me part of it.

TIP: For all you guys that read this blog, if you ever get to go to Seattle WA, make sure you take the Seattle Underground tour to get to know the Seattle history a little better. It costs about $15 (US) and takes some 90minutes, but this is so worth it. You’ll love. Be sure to leave a comment if you do though.

I travel quite a distance by train on a daily basis from my home town all the way to Utrecht and back. It’s a two hour train ride (given there are no delays) and I usually spend that time doing work, either for myself or contract work.

Most of the time there’s no problem, and delay is no more than 5 minutes. Sometimes however, when an accident happens, delays shoot up to two hours. Yesterday was such a day.

Between Best and Eindhoven there was a collision with a person, at about 16:51. Of course this will not have been a pretty sight and I do feel sorry for the victim, but an accident like this during rush hour really is bad timing. In the Netherlands, there are no real other alternatives but to try to travel through others stations. This will not save you any time though, you might just as well wait at the station you stranded for the blockage to be cleared. The NS (Dutch rail road services) usually tries to transport stranded people by bus to the next sensible train station, but it takes about an hour and a half before the first bus arrives, because they first have to call the local touring car operators, who have to assemble their troops of bus drivers. By then, the trainstation is flooded by commuters, who all want into that first bus.

I usually try to find a couple of people who want to share taxi fares. Most of the time this is way faster than trying alternate train routes or the bus. And time is money, so that taxi fare doesn’t seem to be all that expensive after all.

Since I have a monthly subscription to the rail road services, I never tried to get my train fares reimbursed, but I think I should start gathering NS delay information and claim a refund. It’s my right just as much as it is for the people who buy tickets.
You would think the introduction of the OV-Chip (public transport chip card) would make it possible to automatically get a refund if you are plagued with a delay. They can track your movement, where and when you took what bus or train (provided you didn’t get an anonymous chip card). I can imagine automatic reimbursements or refunds will never be part of the automation companies implement. It would probably cost them too much.

I’ve just added the WPtouch plugin to WordPress.

This makes your website appear in iPhone theme and style on mobile devices. It greatly improves readability on a mobile phone.

Here’s a screenshot example from the WPtouch website:

Just recently I was working on a new TSM farm with some co-workers.

We came across some confusing tape limitation documentation in regards to TSM on Linux hosts.
We had to figure out what device drivers are used in what configurations and what limitations would apply then.

We were triggered by some Linux administrator who came in and said Linux only supports 128 tape drives and we should reconfigure our complete TSM infrastructure.

After some checking back and forth between Linux and TSM support we finally had a clear picture. I don’t know if we were the only ones confused by all the kinds of tape device drivers IBM/TSM uses on different platforms, but just in case you are confused as well, I thought I make a summary of all the device drivers, limitations of a TSM server on a Linux host.

If the comments on this article indicate there’s a demand for more, I would love to complete the list with the matrices for more host platforms.

TSM 6.1 on RedHat Linux (RHEL 5.4)

On Linux we have a couple of default SCSI tape device drivers available.

st (SCSI tape) driver.

Resource:
This is a Linux default kernel module driver. in RHEL 5.4 it supports 128 tape drives.
When the st driver is loaded, it detects all sequential media devices (unless they are in the reject_list) if you have a large environment, with a bunch of tape drives (eg a Virtual Tape Library) you might quite easily exceed the maximum number of drives for this driver.  Your system log will show a message like ” st:Too many tape devices (max. 128)” Your solution is to either put the devices in the reject_list or blacklist the module to prevent it from loading, provided you are going to use a vendor provided device driver.

sg (SCSI generic) driver.

Resource:
All scsi devices in Linux can be accessed by this driver. SCSI attached devices like CDROM drives, sequential media devices or hard drives all can make use of this device driver.
Kernel  2.6 and above support at least 1024 devices used by the sg driver.

• lin_tape               (IBM devices) supports 1024 devices
• tsm tape              (non-IBM devices) limited to 256 devices on Linux according to IBM support matrices

Many of you guys out there have gathered a lot of digital information. This might be your private photo collections, home videos, scanned documents and your home administration. All sorts of data that sits somewhere on your computer(s) or NAS devices.

Most of you are are aware of the risk of having it all stored on a single hard disk in your personal computer, whether it be a laptop or whatever workstation you fancy.

The storage bloggers I follow all seem to have a home NAS device, which most likely is setup with multiple drives which has some form of RAID protection. RAID1, RAID5, BeyondRAID are all very good options for home usage.

Closer to home, friends are also wising up to the risk of losing everything if it is all stored on a single drive (hopefully because I try to educate them on that risk). However, not everyone seems to be aware of the risk, nor are they willing to be educated. One person even told me his data was not at risk because the external USB drive wasn’t always connected and therefore could not break. Fortunately I was able to rid him of this misconception.

What am I going to blog about now?

Well, I have set up a way or protecting my own private and business information and have implemented a quick ‘n dirty way of document management.

The way I did this will be described later. Some might think it is a good solution, some might think otherwise. The point is, it works for me (and my family), and I am confident I can recover the data if something happens to either of the copies – the copy at home or the copy at the remote location.

Something about my data.

The private administration is something I could live without, but it is nice if it would be available. It took me some weeks of scanning documents from way back in 1996. I know, I keep too much. I was proud about how neatly I had it organized in folders and stuff, but searching for a document became quite a task, and the number of organizers was growing and eating a lot of cabinet space.

Next to the private information, I also had to organize my business information, which I have to be able to present to the local legislators, and therefore I need to have a proper way of archiving it. In the age of digital information I believe I should practice my profession and store all my documents on a server in an ordered and secure kind of way. I bought myself a shiny new all-in-one printer/scanner from HP which had to be able to scan from a document feeder, double-sided (duplex if you will) automatically. And it had to be scanned into a portable document format.

During a sale on a website I bought myself the HP7780. It has an extra paper tray, and was cheap compared to other all-in-one printer/scanners. It has an ethernet port, wireless and even bluetooth for printing from a cellphone. It is also able to save the duplex ADF scans directly into PDF format to either a removable media device, or a CIFS share. I just happened to have a CIFS share on my home server. An ideal device for my goal.

So, how does this work then?

My home server is an Ubuntu Server (has been Debian for 9+ years before) and holds a bunch of drives. It has two 120GB IDE drives in RAID1 to hold the operating system and all operating system related data. I also have four 1TB SATA drives in RAID5, which holds all my photos, scanned documents, business accounting data and multimedia files like MP3 and HD movies which I stream to my PS3 in HD format.

On this server I have setup CIFS shares. One of the shares points to the location I keep my scanned documents. I have divided it into three sections. Private (P), Business (Z) and kids. The kids (K) sections is a place I keep pictures and scanned files of stuff they made in school and sorts.

The private section holds categories for every company or institution I exchange information with. These are mortgage firms, insurance firms,utility providers for electricity and all other companies that in one form or another have something to do with me living in a house with my wife and kids. Most of you probably know what I mean. Each category is represented by a folder name which makes sense to me.

The same applies to the section I devoted to my business.”Z” is the first letter for the Dutch word for business, which is “zakelijk”. I could have made it a “B”, but since we are Dutch…. Ok whatever.

The folder structure is like this

(fictional names of course);

• sharename
  • private
    • mortgage-firm
    • electricity-provider
    • insurance-firm
    • the-list-goes-on…
  • business
    • accounting
    • contracts
    • the-list-goes-on…
  • kids
    • oldest-son
    • youngest-son
    • this-list-does-not-go-on…

The tree structure in the example above gives you an idea how it is set up.

On the HP7780, I have configured some quick-button settings which hold options on how to scan a certain document (dpi, color/grayscale, fileformat) and where to put it. I have made two options per section. One for single-sided scans and one for duplex scans. The quick-buttons give me an easy way of telling the printer to scan a private document or business document. The scanner places the document in the folder I specified in the quick-button configuration mentioned earlier.

It scans all files into PDF for me (JPG is the other option). One downside that I have experienced so far, is that I cannot do OCR on those files at the moment. The PDF files are actually just images stored in PDF, not text. You might want to use a different format if you want to do OCR. Tiff seems to work best, but that feature is not on the printer.

The printer names the files according to a counter mechanism. I can set a custom prefix, but other then that, the filename is not very helpful. Therefore, when I open the resulting files to see if they are readable, I also rename them to match a specific mask like this;

yyyy-mm-dd_firmname_description.pdf

• yyyy-mm-dd are self explanatory. This enables me to order them chronologically order . The date used is the date I received the particular letter, or the mail date in the letter.
• Firmname should be an indication of which institution or company this letter is from, or to (in case I send the mail).
• The rest of the filename should be a description of the contents.
• I used an underscore as a field separator. I’ll explain later why I did this.

After I rename the file to match the mask, I move it to the folder (aka category) it belongs to. Well, are we done now? No, of course not. I merely scanned and renamed the file and put it in a sensible place. I could be satisfied now, because I can easily retrieve or search for it. It is quite a bit better than the paper archive. It is RAID protected, so I could tolerate a disk failure. Not bad. The renaming might seem a bit cumbersome, but if you don’t backlog this too much, it isn’t really much work at all.

But, as a storage guy, I couldn’t possibly be satisfied yet. I need a way of making sure my data and 30GB of private and business files are recoverable in the event something should happen to my home server. I also want to make sure the files don’t get corrupted or overwritten accidentally. Therefore, a cron task that runs every hour marks all the new files readonly.

To make sure the files are going to be recoverable when disaster strikes, I made a perl script that uses rsync to synchronize a couple of folders (photo’s, file archives) to a server I lease at a hosting provider. I have leased a server there for a couple of years now, and are very satisfied with their service, uptime and of course price. Last month, I switched to a new server, with more capacity and a lower monthly fee. I now have 250GB of RAID1 protected external (you might even consider it cloud-like)  storage to store my mail server data, website(s) and a copy of all my photos and file archives for € 30,- per month excluding taxes.

Since I lease the server itself, it is completely customizable to my own needs. I have a 2TB network transmit limit per month, of which I never reach the limit.

In comparison, if I had to subscribe to a web based backup service, I would have to spend more money on that, would have less flexibility, and would have the problem that most backup services don’t support Linux operating systems.

Phase 1 is complete.

Phase 2 is about managing these documents.

Next to backup. I wanted to make the file archive data more search-able and I wanted a form of document management. I tried several open source tools and Joomla modules to set this up, but the available products only filled part of the requirements I had. It had to be easy, searchable, have several sections and categories.

Guess what. Joomla fills these requirements by means of their article database structure alone. It has sections, categories, and is searchable. I tried to exploit that structure and made another perl script that scans the Joomla content table for articles that match my file archive sections P and Z (but in full text of course). It also fetches all categories in the database and matches the categories I use in my file archive (each category is a company name, remember?). If I have a section or a category in my file archive which is not in the Joomla section or category list, they will be added. All files in my file archive are then compared to the articles in Joomla. If there is no article referring to a file in my archive, a new article is inserted in the content table, with references to the corresponding section, and category.

The files yyyy-mm-dd part is used as the creation date of the article. This way I made sure the articles are in chronological order. The other parts of the file name are split based on the underscore. The words resulting from this split are used as keywords in the article and as the title of the article. Now I can also update articles if information has to be added, or in case information was exchanged with the company the document was from, or sent to. This makes it easy for us to track the history if certain items, like insurance policies.

If I were to remove a file (like a temporary file, contract or whatever…) the article will be archived in Joomla. It isn’t deleted, but it is also no longer visible to the front-end. Of course the articles are only accessible for registered users (so I like to believe), which is just me and my wife.

This is only a quick ‘n dirty way to set up a DIY document management system, but it works for me, and even my wife. She doesn’t have to learn a complex document management tool which would definitely only prevent her from using it.

In summary;

I place all my scanned documents in a sensible folder on my server. These folders get synchronized to a remote server every hour (could be any interval I choose of course).

On the remote server the files and folders get scanned by a perl script and Joomla articles are created referring to each individual file. Keywords are used for searching purposes, and files are ordered chronologically and by sections and categories.

Besides my file archive, my photo’s are also replicated to the remote server, but are only there for recoverability. If I wanted, I could add the Gallery2 package and import them into it. On the remote server, my mailserver and websites are hosted. The backups made by the mailserver, and the database backups and website files are also replicated every hour, but from the remote machine to my home server. I would very much like to be able to recover the websites and mailserver as well of course.

I just wanted to share this with you, and may be spark some ideas for you. I am sure there a better ways to do this, but this is a pretty darn good solution for home usage. Not many of you will have taken care of your photo archives or maybe even file archives like this. The remote leased server has plenty of capacity to last me another couple of years and for only € 30,- per month (excluding taxes), I think this is a fair price for my usage. You show me a backup service or online storage service that offers 250GB capacity for only €30,- and I’ll buy you a case of beer.

I intentionally left out details of the hosting provider. I am not affiliated with them so I do not want to make any type of advertisement for them. If you would like more info on them, just ask me.

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions, please feel free to post them as a comment or contact me trough twitter http://twitter.com/ICoolen

Thanks to Nigel Poulton for helping me out with the post. We collaborated on this using Google Wave. Finally I could put it to good use

Just recently, I joined a project where the goal was to implement cheaper storage. The cost needed to be reduced obviously. I joined the project when the RFP was already done and vendor selection was already done too, so I had no part in the selection process.

My involvement in the implementation was primarily the implementation of a High Performance NAS box and prepare a file services environment for virus scanning, NDMP backup and all that goes with an implementation like NAS. As a second activity I also assisted in the implementation of the management software for the mid-range/modular FC block storage, which happened to be the same vendor as the NAS box.

Like we are used too, the most part of the implementation went without any problem and the gear does what it is supposed to do. What did get my attention however is the management interfaces the vendor had us implement.

The thing I think is most concerning is that vendors think it is OK to implement management software that just doesn’t seem to be fully completed yet, or is going through a transition between older and newer versions, where it seems to be caught up by new technologies faster than the pool of programmers can update the code of the management software.

I have to admit, personally, I never was a fan of the EMC Control Center suite, but I always keep an open mind. However, most EMC shops I worked in, storage admins were complaining about the speed (or better said the lack thereof), functionality, and problems they were experiencing with ECC. I myself turned to the CLI after spending more time looking at the hourglass then actually provisioning anything. In one place I worked in, the ECC server farm had a tremendous capex and opex for managing about 18 symmetrix boxes. A complete server farm was needed to run the ECC suite, including the Storage Scope reporting tool. I was always wondering why customers actually did put up with these practices. Now, with the 6.x version of ECC, things seem to have improved greatly. But still, the customers I speak to, pay a shipload of money to run ECC (license fees, personnel cost, and server cost), while they only use the CLI to manage their EMC storage farm. I just don’t understand that.

One other example I’d like to mention, is HDS’s management suite, they call Hitachi Device Manager (HDvM). A previous version was called Storage Navigator Modular (SNM). SNM version 2 was an improvement over version 1 of course, but never made it to a complete product. Now HDS is transitioning their SNM2 suite into HDvM, where some parts of SNM2 are still using parts of SNM1. While using HDvM, you still have to use SNM2 for some tasks, because not all functions have been ported to HDvM. In my book, this is an incomplete product, and should not be sold to customers, especially ones running in an high-end shop. While working with HDvM and considering all the ancient elements in the software, it kinda made me compare it to Microsoft’s pre-Vista (some will say pre-XP) era, where many modifications were made on top of each other, actually not improving the OS as a whole. Even the CLI for this suite of products are different. There’s a CLI for HDvM, SNM2 and even a separate one for managing replication (CCI-RaidManager).

Then there’s IBM, which is struggling for years to put all storage management software under a single framework. For TSM there is the Integrated Solution Console, for the DS8000 there is a similar themed but completely different product called TotalStorage Manager for DS8000, as well as the SVC Console. The Totalstorage (or System Storage, I can’t keep up with their marketing name changes) web based management tools all have the same theme, but work completely different. For more then six years now, they are trying to simplify management. Most of IBM’s products are based on WebSpere which in my opinion is OK, but should be more reliable. Upgrading the WAS (Websphere Application Server) can break the management console a bit too easy with all the prereqs and pitfalls. In many cases admins revert to completely reinstalling instead of upgrading. Again, not good.

I haven’t been able to get experience with all vendor’s products and management software so I cannot and will not say this applies to all vendors, but the large ones surely have issues getting the management software right and tight. For all the products I know, myself and many others seem to prefer the CLI to manage storage. For all the money involved in this area, that seems like a bad thing to me.

So many vendors are playing catch up to play in the storage arena, all claiming simpler, cheaper, more efficient storage environments by introducing clouds, fancy licensing constructions, and what not. But I think the vendors should pay more attention to the way they build their management software. Just make it work, work fast, work efficient, and make it easy to use.

I thinks there’s plenty of work to be done there which in return can make true to many of the ROI promises the vendors make.

Please comment on this article of you agree or disagree, or share your own experience with us. Some examples of when a vendor has a great GUI or management suite would also be nice.

Disclaimer:
This article is an expression of my own personal opinion and is not to be related to any contract or consulting position I filled, nor is it in any way sponsored.

Before starting my own blog, I used to write an article or two on RupturedMonkeys.com.

Click this link to take a look at these posts, while I ask @_snig to export these posts for me to import on this blog site.

[update]
Ron was so nice to help me out here, by providing me the export of the RupturedMonkey posts. Thanks mate, I really appreciate it.

In case someone missed my recent post on data center disasters in my neighborhood, take a look at this.

Just about a month or two ago, I presented our management with a new proposal for our TSM environment. The primary server grew beyond acceptable limits, and AIX4 clients kept failing backups because the TSM server’s software level was too advanced. So my proposal was accepted, and very soon we would start to implement the new TSM layout. We made a separate TSM server using an older version, so the remaining AIX4 servers could still be backed up. We temporarily used the spare TSM server to act as the AIX4-backup TSM server, because the new design was to be implemented at a short notice.
So we wouldn’t be exposed to possible TSM disasters for very a long time. Two weeks ago, an adjacent building had a little fire (go figure), which was under control by the fire department in just a few minutes. It didn’t affect our data-center, because it was on a separate floor in the adjacent building. The firefighters had to cut out some metal frames from the walls  and threw them onto the adjacent roof. Underneath that roof is our DC. Last week, some rain storms blazed over the country, leaving enormous puddles of water. Guess what. The stuff that was thrown onto our roof punctured the roofing, and made all the water enter our DC today. Some AIX server were standing right underneath the hole, including our primairy TSM server. They were flooded, and water was all over the circuitry.

Although my regular work day was over for about 4 hours, I was still waiting for our AIX admins to turn over the recovered AIX server, so I could start to rebuild the TSM server. Because the TSM backup/spare server was used for another purpose, we had to arrange some new hardware. This new hardware seems to only run LPAR’s, so we had to recover the AIX server into a LPAR. This bedazzled our IBM CE too.

The DS4300 we are hosting our VTL data on, also got some splashes on it, but it still runs fine. We have about 55 TB of backup data on the box. Last weekend, we migrated all data from the wet VTL into a newly build VTL server and storage. I have to say that the Diligent Company was very helpful and made the license delivery overnight, no questions asked. All the paperwork was done afterward. Kudos to Diligent….

Although we have everything under control, or least we think we do, it was quite a disturbing week.
Events like this always proof that you never have everything under control.