I attended training this month in Columbus, OH covering our Celerra NAS device. We had 2 choices for our labs, we could either use command line or GUI for the whole course. I chose to use command line. So I learned to do all of the day to day activities via the command line. Some of the operations we performed included allocating new storage to a host, configuring specific network interfaces, syncing with a NTP server, etc. One of the interesting things I learned is that the Celerra supports iSCSI and is used in several EMC shops for this purpose. This would allow us to allocate SAN storage through our IP network.
I participated in several discussions related to the replacement of our backup and recovery environment. We invited IBM back to give additional information on their proposal. In addition, we participated in a Gartner call. They provided Pros and Cons to the three vendors we are considering. Given the information they provided I feel confident the decision we made was the right one.
I worked with Evan on producing metrics documentation for the monthly executive report. I wrote perl scripts to gather usage data from the Clariion and compile it into a format suitable for the report. I also, gathered port usage data from our FC switches for inclusion in the report. In the end I experimented some with Excel 2007 to provide a more aesthetic appealing look to the final report given to Vartan.
BlueArc troubleshooting for Linux/CIFS permission issues is on going. Mike McCaughey, one of our research community users, is having issues with permissions presented from the BlueArc to a Linux host that is mounting the NAS via CIFS. Through BlueArc support, co-worker input, and experimenting myself with a Redhat Linux Rel 4 client, it appears they are using an older version of Samba that doesn’t support presentation of ownership and access permissions through a CIFS mount to a Linux host. I am still waiting for them to give me a final answer on whether or not they have an upgrade in their road map.
Peter has provided me a new Redhat Linux VM that is bound to our LDAP servers for authentication. I have used this VM to provide a new front end to our NAS environment. The BlueArc and the Celerra are mounted via NFS to this system with root level authorization for management. In addition, I have migrated our performance gathering tools for the Clariion from Samsara to this machine. The on going function of this machine will be for management tasks of our storage environment, especially tasks we can script. In addition, Evan has configured a samba share of these NFS shares on this machine for use with a metrics gathering utility.
The SVC was installed this month for evaluation purposes. As it turns out this device does not support our older SAN (Hitachi Lightning 9970) for a quorum drive. This drive is used for the SVC to keep track of the state of the management cluster. At this time we don’t want to attach this evaluation equipment to our production SAN for testing purposes. So IBM has been asked to provide a storage device to house the quorum drive so that we can complete our evaluation. We’ll see if they are able to come through with it.
Evan and I produced a list of pre-approved standard changes. We discussed any change in our storage environment we could think of and what the possible impact would be. We ended up with a very conservative list after a requirement for self-documentation was presented.
At the end of this month I was invited by Dave Mathews to participated in the Cisco ORMA evaluation of our network environment. I provided a detailed explanation of our Netid infrastructure.
