RAID Archives – Gestalt IT

Tech Field Day Boston: The Links

April 20, 2010 By Stephen Foskett 3 Comments

As usual, the Tech Field Day event received massive amounts of attention, generating thousands of tweets and dozens of blog posts and videos from delegates and bystanders alike. We will attempt to collect those links here for reference and review.

Filed Under: All, Events, Exclusive, Featured, Tech Tagged With: Barry Burke, Bas Raayman, Boston, Cisco, Devang Panchigar, Drobo, Drobo FS, Edward Haletky, EMC, Flickr, Gabrie van Zanten, Greg Ferro, HP, IBRIX, iTunes, Jeff Darcy, Matt Simmons, Posterous, RAID, Rick Vanover, Robin Harris, Secure Multi Tenancy, Simon Long, SImon Seagrave, Stu Miniman, Tech Field Day, Tech Field Day Roundtable Podcast, twitter, UCS, vblock, Vimeo, vmware, YouTube

Disastrous Thinking

January 15, 2010 By Martin Glassborow Leave a Comment

If you don’t cluster your arrays, how do you protect against the failure of a RAID rank? Statistically unlikely but it is it more or less unlikely than a loss of data-centre? I’m not sure and the failure of a RAID rank for many people could well mean the invocation of the disaster recovery plan. Why?

Filed Under: Storage Tagged With: Barry Burke, disaster recovery, NetApp, RAID, replication, XIV

We Hold These (Storage) Truths…

October 12, 2009 By Stephen Foskett 2 Comments

I usually welcome discussion (and even argument) about the things I know best: There is always more to learn, and the best insights come through engaging those who disagree with us. But some ideas have been argued so well for so long that they deserve enshrinement. For example, although non-scientists like to argue about evolution [...]

Filed Under: Server Virtualization, Storage Tagged With: Computer history, data protection, dumb disk, Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, performance, RAID, RAID-5, storage management, TCO

EMC Symmetrix: Dynamic Hot Spares

July 23, 2009 By Devang Panchigar Leave a Comment

There are two types of sparing strategies available on EMC Symmetrix Series of machines. In this post we will discuss the benefits and the criteria’s related to the use of Dynamic Hot Spares on EMC Symmetrix Systems.

Filed Under: Storage Tagged With: Bin File, DMX, DMX3, DMX4, Dynamic Hot Spares, EMC Symmetrix, Enginuity, hot spares, performance, Permanent Spares, RAID, Raid 1, raid 10, RAID 6, raid xp, RAID-5, Redundancy, spares, V-Max

EMC Symmetrix: Permanent Sparing

July 22, 2009 By Devang Panchigar Leave a Comment

There are two types of sparing strategies available on EMC Symmetrix Series of machines. In this post we will discuss the benefits and the criteria’s related to the use of Permanent Spares on the EMC Symmetrix Systems.

Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4

March 31, 2009 By Stephen Foskett Leave a Comment

VMware has cranked out another update to their flagship enterprise product, ESX 3.5. The last update came out in early November, 2008, and included some major new functionality. What’s in store this time to intrigue storage folks? Not much.

Filed Under: All, Server Virtualization, Storage Tagged With: 3.5, 3PAR, 82598, AHCI, ATA, Broadcom, CERC, driver, Emulex, Enterprise storage, ESX, Gestalt IT, HP, i, ICH10, ICH7, ICH9, IDE, Intel, LSI, LUN, MegaRAID, NetApp, NetXtreme, NPIV, PMC, PXE, QLogic, RAID, RDM, SAS, SATA, SCSI, Smart Array, SnapDrive, SSD, StorageTek, Sun, Update 4, Virtual Storage, VMFS, vmware, VSS, Windows, Windows Server 2003

Fishworks Simulator Hint and other VSA stuff

March 1, 2009 By Martin Glassborow Leave a Comment

The Fishworks Simulator has been driving me a bit nuts; I couldn’t get ESXi to reliably use a Fishwork’s iSCSI LUN as a data-store; it would consistently hang whilst installing an Virtual Machine. I coudn’t see anything wrong but it would just die.

Filed Under: All, Storage Tagged With: EMC, ESXi, FalconStor, Fishworks, iSCSI, NFS, RAID, Sun, VSA

How to Resize ZFS

February 28, 2009 By Stephen Foskett 2 Comments

If you’ve been experimenting with ZFS, as we have, you’ve been struck by some of its limitations in terms of flexibility, but there is one way to expand a zpool, as demonstrated by Harry D in a two-part blog post.

Filed Under: Desktop, Storage Tagged With: capacity, flexibility, RAID, ZFS

Expectations with new Generation of DMX Technology

February 26, 2009 By Devang Panchigar Leave a Comment

There has been a big chatter about the next generation of EMC machines. After the initial release of DMX-3’s in 2005 and then the DMX-4’s in 2007, next generation DMX is almost due now. Here is my wish list or expectations on the new DMX Platform.

Filed Under: All, Storage Tagged With: BCV, Celerra, CLARiiON, cost, deduplication, DMX, dmx-3, dmx-4, DMX-5, ECC, efficiency, EMC, flash, iSCSI, management, performance, RAID, RAID-DP, RAID-S, SATA, Symmetrix

Doing More (with the same or less)

February 12, 2009 By Martin Glassborow Leave a Comment

Capital budgets are pretty tight this year and IT teams all over the globe are being to do more with the same or less. This is good in many ways and hopefully we will overcome some of the profligacy of the past but the responsibility is in our (the end-users) hands, we can’t simply expect the vendors who have encouraged of profligacy in the past to come riding to our rescue.

Filed Under: All, Storage Tagged With: budgets, CAPEX, OPEX, RAID